July 16, 2009

Special Report: Christmas in July? At Kmart & Sears it is...

By now you may have heard that Kmart & Sears is celebrating Christmas in July online and in select Sears stores.

Upon hearing this, I decided to check out Kmart & Sears Christmas websites. The result was ..well.. disappointment. It seems as if they just threw up a few Christmas items and made a fancy Flash page to advertise it. Tom Barlow of BloggingStocks summed it up well, "The campaign shows little thought or investment beyond a landing page and a few links to existing catalog items. Dare I suggest that this is typical Kmart, unimaginative and short-sighted? I haven't even bought my Halloween costume and Thanksgiving turkey yet. Are they giving up on those holidays?" and goes on to say "Will Kmart even be around in January to accept returns? With promotions like this, I have to wonder." The last comment was a bit harsh, but I have to agree with the rest.

There really wasn't much excitement in what they put up on the sites and the prices weren't very special either. Although as of this writing they did start a buy more, save more special. The whole thing just seems to be a little too gimmicky for me.

One has to wonder if this is a desperate attempt by Sears Holdings Chairman Eddie Lampert to stir up interest in Kmart & Sears. Although I believe it has created a bit of publicity for them, most of it hasn't been very good. Time just posted an article online titled "Kmart's Christmas in July: Inspiration or Desperation?" MSN ran two article about their Christmas promotion in the past week. Neither had much positive to say though. You can read the articles here and here.

You be the judge, check out Kmart and Sears Christmas sites (which are essentially the same) and comment on what you think. Also, if anyone has been to one of the select Sears stores that have a Christmas shop, please post on your experience.

2 comments:

  1. Check out my blog too... may I link to your site from mine?
    http://superkmart.blogspot.com/

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  2. Hi Paul,
    Love the blog. I'm a huge K-Mart fan!! Of course, the K-Mart in my town (Appleton, WI) closed about 10 years ago. First it was a regular K-Mart (glory days) then it turned into a Big K and moved about a quarter of a mile from Wal-Mart. Well, you can take a guess as to how that went. The nice thing about K-Mart was the store was small so if you needed to go and buy a couple things, you didn't have to trapse all over. Plus, it was in a quieter part of town so you didn't have to fight traffic. IMHO, K-mart biggest mistake was trying to be a direct competitor of Wal-Mart. It just doesn't have the resources that WM does. If they had stayed with the little stores with the cafes and slushies, I think they would have had more success. Seeing your pics brought back a lot of memories.

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