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