Carol Schroeder to Blog for G&DA

Veteran retailer Carol Schroeder shares her blog with Gifts & Decorative Accessories.  Our "Savvy Store Solutions" contributor will share her experience and perspective on the everyday ups and downs of being a gift and decorative accessories retailer. Carol Schroeder is author of Specialty Shop Retailing: Everything You Need to Know to Run Your Own Store published by John Wiley & Sons. She is also a retail advisor to the Gift and Home Trade Association.

Enjoy her first shared posting with us:

Giving Thanks
This Friday has been termed “Black Friday” by the media, because of the idea that this one day’s sales are so important that they put major retailers in the black.  That doesn’t tend to be true for independent retailers, who miss out on the feeding frenzy of shoppers flocking to the malls and big box stores the day after Thanksgiving. (And if this was the day that made us suddenly profitable, I like to think we’d be creative enough to come up with a more cheerful name.)

Statistics show that a staggering 1/3 of all shoppers will visit Wal-mart this Friday, and another 1/5 will visit Sears, Target or J C Penney’s — for a total of 150 million people. And according to Lee Eisenberg in Shoptimism, (continued)