10 Practical Actions to Draw a Line Under the Old Year and Set Yourself Up for a Rapid Start in the New Year

With the new year coming up, it’s traditional to look back, especially if you are looking at the year that is ending. It’s also a good idea to complete the old year as well as you can before you set out on the new year. It makes sense to do this at a very basic level, with things so basic that most people will not stop to think about them. Here are ten very simple ways to draw a line under the old year so that you are more ready for the new year.

• Clean carpets, hair, laundry, dishes, tables, inbox, cat box, and anything else you can think of. Throw away the bad food from the refrigerator. Take out the trash.
• Make a backup of your digital life. Label it as belonging to the year that is ending. Delete obsolete files. Remove older files from cloud storage and put them in an offline archive. Then, reboot your computer.
• Exercise. If you go running for five minutes, imagine that you are running from the old year to the new year.
• Throw away clothing and shoes that are too worn out to wear in the new year.
• Abandon projects that you planned or attempted during the old year without success, particularly ones that you would dread looking at now.
• Unfollow or block “friends” who have become a harmful or abusive presence in your life.
• Throw away the old calendar or appointment book. Consider scanning and archiving any necessary notes first.
• Finish projects and courses that are underway where you have only a little work remaining.
• Locate tools and supplies you will need for new projects or the new season. Put new strings on a guitar, or just tune the strings that are there. Test equipment you will be using in the near future.
• Recharge batteries for your phone and anything else. Replace failed batteries and burned out light bulbs.

I am sure you can think of other simple ways of renewing for the new year. Actions like these might seem too small to matter, but do just three of them at one time while holding the traditional intention of a happy new year, and you’ll start to feel the sense of importance and anticipation that goes with a new year and a fresh start.

Christmas Shopping Season 2018: Final Notes

This is a five-day weekend for those of us taking off Friday and Monday in addition to the Tuesday holiday. That adds up to a lot of shopping days, so perhaps it is not such a surprise that retail traffic has fizzled early. I again saw heavy shopping traffic on Friday morning, but what followed was a slow fade. The Saturday before Christmas is often the biggest in-store shopping day of the year, but if that was the case this year it was spread out evenly across the entire day. There were no periods of traffic backups or overflow parking that I heard about. Sunday was slower than Saturday, though what I saw locally could have been affected by a late afternoon television sports event. It is too early in the day to say what Christmas Eve holds for retail, but everyone I am hearing from is either back in the office today or treating today as a holiday. There are no stories of last-minute holiday preparations. There must be plenty of people traveling today too, but I don’t have any anecdotes to verify this.

Adding up the weekend, it is still bigger than a normal two-day weekend, but far short of the shopping frenzy some retailers were counting on. The end-of-season fizzle is probably a death knell for Sears and Kmart and a few other struggling retailers, doubtless including some that looked like they were doing fine.

The shopping season was more troublesome in the U.K., with prominent reports of consumer worries and mid-month layoffs. Consumers and businesses alike are worried about a Brexit recession just months away that may ring in two or three years of hard times nationally and a lost decade in central London.

This month was the first large-scale test for Amazon’s extended delivery network along with similar experiments by other large online retailers, and I wouldn’t say it passed the test. Packages were delivered on time, better than in any of the past four Christmas shopping seasons, but that had more to do with buyers buying early than a well-functioning delivery network. With so many Uber drivers and other near-amateur delivery agents venturing into delivery, there have been more stories of delivery failures this month than ever before. Packages were delivered to the wrong address, then returned to the warehouse to be shipped all over again, creating a week-long delay. Cardboard boxes were tossed at the curb in front of a house or left out in the rain. I did not have a problem with the two packages delivered to my house this month, but everyone I have talked to has heard stories about delivery failures.

The systemic problems in package delivery are not a hopeful sign for Amazon in particular, which is limited in its reach by the lack of a scalable delivery mechanism. Its continuing drone experiments have not drawn much attention this year because they show little indication of helping. A drone delivery costs more than $10, is limited to about a kilogram of cargo, and presents unprecedented security challenges, so it is hard to find a business use case for it. Amazon cannot grow much larger until it it can design a solution for delivering a larger number of packages. This is not a problem that Amazon can solve just by spending more money, because it is trying to create something that has never existed in history.

The biggest takeaway from this year‘s shopping season is the change in consumer mood. Consumers in general are more self-assured and decisive, based especially on what I have seen in the stores. This is not necessarily good news for retailers, because the new consumer is perfectly happy to spend less and get less if that is the simple solution to a problem. From my point of view, though, this is a hopeful sign. If shoppers are less easily manipulated and able to simply go away when stores are treating them abusively, this could be the early sign of a seismic shift in commercial culture. Business that try to sell according to a system and never take the time to look at their customers may fall away, leaving us with a simplified commercial space inhabited by a smaller number of healthier business.

Sears’ Future Depends on a Christmas Miracle

Chris Isidore at CNN Business looks at the latest bankruptcy court action and provides a grim outlook on the future of Sears and Kmart: Sears’ next few weeks will determine its future. Key points:

• Accounting measures confirm reports of few shoppers in stores.
• Sales have to pick up sharply in the next four days.
• The company is rapidly burning through its cash, something that couldn’t possibly happen at a healthy retailer during the peak shopping season of the year.
• There is only one known bid to keep stores open. This is a no-cash bid from the company’s CEO. Creditors don’t like the bid and have asked the court to disallow it.

The only plausible hope for Sears and Kmart at this point is that holiday-season revenue is better than the company’s own accountants say. If December sales are not as bad as they look, there is a chance that a buyer will materialize during the week after Christmas. It’s hard to get detailed and meaningful financial measures in real time, so it will take about two more weeks to find out whether the two retail chains have to go into liquidation in the early months of 2019.

Update, Friday, December 21: Lauren Hirsch at CNBC reports “Sears weighs 50 to 80 more store closures as challenges mount for Eddie Lampert’s bid to keep the retailer alive.” Unpacking the headline:

• Sears is planning to close more stores ASAP.
• There are gaps in the CEO’s bid for Sears assets. There is no formal bid yet and the problems are serious enough that a bid might not be put together in time for next week’s deadline. In the meantime, there are no publicly known bids.

I am only speculating, but it seems to me that the “bid” for Sears might be just for show, with the thought of creating the appearance of an active auction so that the real bidders will be encouraged to place bids. It is all for nothing if there are no potential buyers waiting in the wings.

Timing of Holiday-Season Shopping

From what I am seeing and hearing, this season’s Christmas shopping traffic seems strong enough, but something has changed. The timing of shopping is off, based on the expectations of previous years. I mentioned this on Black Friday, when daytime retail traffic was far below the historic levels of Black Friday and even below that of a normal fall Saturday. The heavier retail traffic on Thanksgiving weekend occurred on Thanksgiving night and on Sunday afternoon.

This pattern of changes in retail timing continued last weekend. The heaviest retail traffic I saw was on Friday morning through lunch hour and on Sunday from late morning till early evening. Many workers take the day off on a Friday in the later part of December, and of course, many workers are paid on Thursday and Friday, so it should not be surprising to have extra shopping traffic on Friday — but why Friday morning? My guess is that there were people who had travel plans or parties scheduled later in the day and wanted to do their shopping as soon as the stores opened. Regardless of the details, for so much shopping to be shifted to a Friday morning shows that shopping has become more of a secondary activity which must give way to the more interesting activities on the schedule.

I suppose this is not really news. It is, after all, the main reason why holiday-season shopping has been shifting toward November and October, so that time spent in stores does not clash with the actual social occasions of the holiday season. But the timing of shopping trips is clearly different this year, so the change must mean more than just this.

UK Plan to Leave EU Collapses in Pool of Recrimination

As I write this, the plan for the U.K. to leave the EU lacks support in Parliament. Vote-counters estimate that two thirds of Parliament would vote against the plan. The vote that had nearly been placed on the schedule has been canceled. A vote on a “softer” alternative plan has also been called off. As of today, the government has no plan at all. It is probably too late to approve any measures to manage the UK exit from EU before the date that is scheduled to happen. How did we get to this point?

Looking at it one way, this is a situation set up by the laws of the EU. The law does not make it easy to negotiate a phased withdrawal. In practical political terms, this requires a consensus among EU members and enabling legislation passed by the leaving country. That is a broader base of agreement that politicians are used to dealing with.

Looking at it another way, you can place all the blame on the British Prime Minister. There is only one game for leaving the EU: prepare a consensus plan from the beginning, then persuade all parties involved that it is the only possible plan. The British government did the exact opposite. It delayed for a year with no plan at all and no serious study of the issues, then presented a plan intended to abuse its position to gain advantage. By some miracle, this plan was approved at the EU level, but there was never an effort to sell it to voters or Parliament. People are just now learning the details, and when leaders ask why certain things were done a certain way, there is no explanation. That is not the way you persuade stakeholders that your plan is the only possible solution. Doing so requires being able to explain why any possible alternative would create terrible problems somewhere that no one has a solution for. If you intend to pass a plan by decree without the ability to defend it point by point, it will go badly.

I don’t think anyone knows where the “Brexit” process goes from here. There is no constructive dialog going on in Parliament that could work out the issues involved. Some observers believe that the U.K. will remain in the EU, not just because it is too late to fix the plan, but also because the referendum that approved the U.K. exit from the EU might not be legally valid. Some who support the EU exit or who worry about the EU coming apart at the next global economic crisis now think this is the wrong time. Such a complicated maneuver should not be done without leadership, and there is no real leadership in the U.K. right now.

But the other alternative is the “hard Brexit” suggested by EU law, followed by piecemeal measures after the fact to try to undo some of the damage. This remains a very real possibility, but the human impact would be severe. A large number of workers, on the order of a million, would be affected directly. These are workers with jobs in foreign countries. They could lose their jobs immediately or lose access to their jobs as soon as they travel between countries. There would be a recession in London and possibly in all of Britain as a hundred large companies move offices to other countries. The main reason this scenario remains a possibility is that under the law, “hard Brexit” is what happens by default if British policy continues its current drift and no further formal action is taken.

The statement below from EC President Donald Tusk is indicative of the state of affairs as of last night. No one knows what to do.

I have decided to call #EUCO on #Brexit (Art. 50) on Thursday. We will not renegotiate the deal, including the backstop, but we are ready to discuss how to facilitate UK ratification. As time is running out, we will also discuss our preparedness for a no-deal scenario.

— Donald Tusk (@eucopresident) December 10, 2018

The Electric Truck Transition Will Go Faster Than Electric Cars

It’s taken a century for the electric car to get a good, strong foothold in the market. Electric trucks are a harder problem to solve because a truck requires so much power compared to a car. Therefore, it will take electric trucks an even longer time to start to build market share. That’s the conventional view of the upcoming transition in trucks, from the viewpoint of the auto industry. But that is the wrong way of looking at it.

The real obstacle holding back electric vehicles is the battery. For the ideal electric vehicle, the battery should be smaller and lighter than the batteries used in vehicles today — and not just a little smaller and lighter. To overtake the internal combustion engine on its own terms, batteries should be about one third smaller and one third lighter. To compete strongly in initial selling price for cars, batteries should also be about one third less expensive.

The most important point to understand about the transition to electric vehicles is that there is nothing to stop this advance in battery technology from happening. It is a simple, well-defined problem in materials engineering, so simple and so well-defined that the answer could arrive on any given day and be out on the road in prototype form one week later. How quickly it could go into mass production is a more complicated question, and experts have varying opinions, but there is a consensus that it will happen sometime between 2019 and 2060.

Note, however, that no such breakthrough is necessary for electric cars to dominate the market. As I have written before, electric cars are so much more durable than fuel-burning cars that they can eventually dominate the roads with a market share as low as 2 percent at the point of sale. It is the same way that LED light bulbs dominate home lighting even though about half of light bulbs sold are still the low-efficiency fluorescent and incandescent types. The product that lasts longer holds its space in the world for longer. The product that lasts only a few years has an exaggerated share of product sales because it is constantly being replaced.

Already electric cars are at or approaching a 1 percent market share, so the pace of deliveries does not have to pick up much for them to take over the roads in the long run.

Something that has always separated cars from trucks is market concentration. Roughly 50 well-known brands own virtually the entire car market. That has never been the case with trucks. There are hundreds of truck manufacturers. The cost of entry is relatively low. Any automotive engineer and mechanic with a drive-in warehouse space can build their first truck. Truck building does not require an assembly line or even a factory.

One way of understanding this is to look at how long trucks last. I remember being amazed at the stories of cars that ran for 200,000 or 300,000 miles. For a pickup truck to be equally amazing, it has to pass 1,000,000 miles of driving. That is because, in a practical sense, a truck can be completely rebuilt, or as much as necessary, in the repair shop. There is no part of a truck that can’t be replaced if you want to do the work.

This also implies that, with only a moderate level of guidance from an engineer, a mechanic could remove the engine and fuel tank from a truck and replace them with a battery and electric drive. This means that electric trucks could get a foothold in the market without even having a manufacturer. For all I know, there are already well-tested published designs for converting a Chevy Van or Ford F-150 pickup to electric. If those do not yet exist, they will be coming before long.

There is nothing to stop engineers from taking existing truck components and putting them together with components created for electric cars to create an electric truck. It is probably too complex a problem for a single engineer working alone, but certainly not too complex for a small number of skilled engineers collaborating over the Internet. This means that as soon as problems are solved in electric car design, the same solutions are available for use in trucks.

So electric trucks would be inevitable even if there were no manufacturers. But there are manufacturers, such as Rivian, a tiny company profiled by CNN Business. The small scale of any electric truck manufacturing operation tells you how small the cost of entry is. That means there will be many more — so many companies competing that the market leaders in fuel-burning trucks may not be able to catch up once the market starts to shift.

Companies like Ford and General Motors are starting to shift away from fuel-burning cars because it is already evident that that market is getting away from them. They will try to make the transition in SUVs and light trucks. But they will have to move quickly. If they try to manage the transition on their own schedule, they will wake up one morning to discover that that market is gone too.

General Motors Cuts Back on Fuel-Burning Cars

We can add General Motors to the list of auto manufacturers scrambling to catch up with the changing car market. In a series of adjustments rumored in November and since confirmed, General Motors will close half of its car manufacturing plants in North America over the next three years, and the rest may last only a few years longer. Some observers see General Motors shifting car manufacturing to overseas factories, but that is a false picture created from mistaken assumptions. The factories that remain overseas will also have to cut back in the near term and are also at risk of being shut down in the coming years as demand for fuel-burning cars dries up.

I have seen complaints that say General Motors is cutting back too much, too soon, and politicians in both the United States and Canada have suggested that the company might be persuaded to reconsider or delay its cutbacks. This shows how poorly people remember history. It was just this mistake that brought the old General Motors to the brink of bankruptcy in 2008, leading into its 2009 bankruptcy reorganization that created the current General Motors. People, I think, forget the time scales that a major auto maker must deal with. General Motors has to plan out its designs, supply chain, and manufacturing capacity three years in advance. It is far more costly if such a large and cumbersome organization has to move faster than that. What will the demand for fuel-burning cars be three years from now in the 2022 model year? To be blunt about it, there is no assurance that anyone in the world will still be buying new fuel-burning cars at that point. By then, demand for fuel-burning cars will have fallen off so much that, in theory, the entire demand could be met with used cars. General Motors is betting that many of its wealthier customers will still be buying its new cars at that point, and it seems like a good bet to me, but when you look at how much money is at stake on what is essentially a consumer whim, it is understandable if the company is nervous.

As it closes factories, General Motors is eliminating many of its car models. The list notably includes the Volt, the ill-advised hybrid design that combined an electric drive with a gasoline-powered generator. It was a money-losing proposition from beginning to end, undertaken mainly as a public relations stunt. The Volt got the attention the company was looking for, but it never gained the credibility its designers had hoped for.

Some of the auto industry speculation is that people will be less interested in owning cars as new designs make them more reliable. We may become a nation of renters when it comes to cars. This doesn’t necessarily mean that drivers will drive less, but there will be fewer total cars, with fewer cars sitting idle on any given day. This would seem to imply less manufacturing and more maintenance in the future of cars, though it is hard to be sure. The important thing to note is that fuel-burning cars will not be cost-competitive whether people are renting or owning.

Consider the risks if manufacturers cut back capacity too quickly. Some of the remaining factories might have to work two shifts to make enough cars. There could be a shortage, prompting a few buyers to go for used cars instead. This is not so bad. Balance that against the risk if manufacturers keep more capacity than they need. There could be billions of dollars in unsold inventory in dealer lots and in rented parking lots in Detroit. The auto manufacturers could go bankrupt and all their factories could close. That is a bigger problem, and that is the scenario that General Motors is trying to guard against.

While the focus is on cars right now, light trucks will follow just a few years later as battery technology advances and scales up, and heavy trucks just a few years after that. What happens to cars will eventually happen to the rest of the industry.

The political rumor machine has it that the United States will eliminate all subsidies for efficient and low-emission vehicles. That move probably makes sense at this point. Subsidies may have a place as a way to get a new approach off the ground. It hardly makes sense to use them as a way to speed the old guard into bankruptcy.

Retail Traffic Picks Up

A full week has gone by since Cyber Monday, and there are a few answers about Black Friday and the current holiday shopping season. Retail traffic has picked up since Black Friday. The Saturday that followed Black Friday was nearly as busy at retail as Black Friday itself, from what I could see, and that is a striking departure from the last few years. Cyber Monday showed a healthy increase in purchases from last year. The usual pattern of after-work shoppers was very much in evidence where I was last Wednesday and Thursday. Then Friday and Saturday, a week after Black Friday, were at least as busy as Black Friday was. On both weekends, shopping dropped off when Sunday arrived.

Black Friday, then, is a shopping holiday in search of a purpose. The gimmick of getting shopping families out in the middle of the night can’t be very profitable for the retailers who go all out to make it happen, nor could it be good for employee morale. The use of high-profile loss leaders on Black Friday isn’t working if shoppers get their purchases before 2 a.m. and head home, not to return to the same store for the rest of the year.

The idea of Black Friday won’t go away, but retailers are approaching it all wrong. Instead of trying to make a few one-off sales to the most hard-core bargain shoppers, retailers might do better to try to appeal to family shoppers on a day when students are not in school. A sensible Black Friday special might be on an item that parents will buy for their children with the children present — children’s winter coats, boots, shoes, and socks, perhaps.

Black Friday fell especially early on this year’s calendar, and that could have been a factor. Perhaps the low traffic on Black Friday reflects a growing split in Christmas shopping, in which one faction tends to complete Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving and the other postpones most purchases until the last two weekends before Christmas. If this is what is happening to Christmas shoppers — and it is consistent with what I am seeing — then Black Friday falls squarely in the dead zone between these two groups, presenting a special difficulty in appealing to either group. Looking at this trend, the prospect of renaming Black Friday as Don’t Buy Anything Day looks like it might have a chance.

Does the bleak Black Friday mean that Christmas shopping is reversing its trend of the last two decades, to shift from November to December? I don’t think that’s possible. A plurality of shoppers buy presents that have to be shipped to their recipients, and consumers have come to accept that such shipments have to be sent out no later than the first week of December to have reasonable assurance of arriving in time for Christmas. The people still shopping on December 7, then, either are buying just for their own household so that nothing has to be shipped or have decided to accept the possibility that their gifts might arrive several days late. I don’t see how either rationale for late Christmas shopping could increase suddenly or by very much. The current mail crisis in Canada, in which a job action has resulted in a four-week backlog of packages in the mail, is a reminder of the risks that gift-givers face by trying to do their shopping in December.

Another observation from the current shopping season is the large number of major retailers with extended online outages on Cyber Monday and the five days before. This comes after a relatively clean, trouble-free online shopping season in 2017. Maybe 2017 was a glitch, but the way I see it, the more likely explanation is that retailers have become overconfident after a clean 2017. One indication of this is that it appears that the cross-selling engines used by retailers provided the excess load that crashed web sites leading into Cyber Monday. On some sites, I have heard, the product pages loaded just fine at the same time that the front page, category pages, and search pages remained inaccessible for hours at a time. This is surely a sign that a cross-selling strategy that targeted users arriving at these pages was overloaded by the near-record volume of shoppers. Deciding what product to recommend to a specific known customer is a computationally intensive real-time process, but it was a mistake for retailers to lean so heavily on their cross-selling algorithms that their sites became inaccessible to customers who only wanted to buy a specific product. There is nothing commercially wrong with having such an advanced cross-selling strategy, but by next November, retailers will be looking for an approach that can fall back to something more efficient instead of shutting the site down when shopper traffic exceeds server capacity.

The disappearance of the Black Friday crowds has far-reaching implications for retail capacity. For a lifetime, retail floor size and parking area has been tuned to the Black Friday crowds. This year there were no Black Friday crowds. Few parking lots were more than 25 percent full at any point, and that means that the stores too were uncomfortably below their shopping capacity. Stores and parking lots alike could be half as large and still easily accommodate the peak shopping crowd of the year. Alternatively, we could get by with half as many stores. More retailers will be looking to emulate the small footprint of specialty retailers like Gap, Apple, and Victoria’s Secret, and that could lead to a decline in total retail real estate. Another scenario is that retail chains resist the need to slim down, leading to a parade of retail-chain bankruptcies over the next decade.

Returning my attention to the current season, my feeling is that we hit a brief early-December lull through the middle of next week, followed by more hectic after-work, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday shopping periods. Christmas Eve, falling on a Monday with many workers having the day off, could be busier than usual.