The EconomistNovember 28th 2020 Business 591O
xford-dictionary lexicologists re-
cently declared “blursday” a word of
the year. Pandemic-induced date confu-
sion extends beyond self-isolating house-
holds. Best Buy, a large American electron-
ics retailer, recently declared that “Black
Friday isn’t just one day this year—it’s
months long.”
The start of the pre-Christmas shopping
season, which this year falls on November
27th, has long been a bonanza for American
retailers. The term itself is often credited to
Philadelphia’s policemen, who used it to
describe the pandemonium caused by sub-
urban shoppers and tourists thronging the
city ahead of the annual Army-Navy Ameri-
can-football game on the Saturday after
Thanksgiving. By the 1980s shops recog-
nised the branding opportunity—and be-
gan marking the occasion with deep dis-
counts and “doorbuster” deals to pull
people from their turkey-laden tables to
shopping aisles.
These days retailers make one-fifth of
their holiday revenue, defined as sales in
November and December, in the five days
from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, in-
vented in 2005 by the National Retail Fed-
eration (nrf), a trade group, in recognition
of an online sales bump on the first work-
ing day after the holiday weekend. Black
Friday typically attracts more than twice
the foot traffic of other annual shopping
sprees in America.
This year, though, covid-19 has made
many shoppers reluctant to elbow their
way to cut-price wedding gowns or tv sets.
So large retailers have, like Best Buy,
stretched Black Friday from a frenzied 24
hours to several weeks. Walmart, Target
and other big-box retailers announced dis-
counts on holiday items as early as October
11th. In lieu of mall Santas and mistletoe,
they offered refurbished online interfaces,
generous return policies and expanded op-
tions for kerbside pickup. Amid the pan-
demic-induced collapse of travel and other
“experiential” spending, some of the un-
spent dosh is going on stuff instead, notes
Jill Standish of Accenture, a consultancy.
nrf expects this year’s holiday retail sales
to grow by as much as 5% compared with
2019, as friends and families use gifts to
show long-distance appreciation.
Even if nrf’s forecast proves accurate,
however, this year’s haul is unlikely to ar-
rest the stagnation of the holiday shopping
season. Its share of annual retail sales fad-NEW YORK
America’s favourite spree isn’t what it
used to beShopping frenziesFade from black
I
n the days before Thanksgiving two top
contenders emerged for Simon &Schus-
ter, the fifth-biggest English-language
book publisher by revenues, from Via-
comcbs, an American media group. On No-
vember 25th Bertelsmann gained the upper
hand. With an offer of $2.2bn the German
parent of Penguin Random House (prh),
the largest publisher by a Tolstoyan mar-
gin, outbid News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s
media group, whose catalogue contains
HarperCollins, ranked third (see chart).
A merger with Simon & Schuster would
give prhalmost one-third of English-lan-
guage book sales. That is more than double
the market share of its closest rival, Ha-
chette Livre, owned by Lagardère, an ailing
French conglomerate. (Vivendi, a French
group that is Lagardère’s biggest share-
holder, also briefly vied for Simon & Schus-
ter.) In America the merged biblio-behe-
moth would control 70% of the market for
literary fiction.
Authors and agents worry that the en-
larged prh may become ever more domi-
nant in distribution—and that market con-
centration could lead to an excessive focus
on bestsellers such Michelle Obama’s
memoir of her time as America’s first lady
(which was published by a prhsubsidiary)
at the expense of niche titles that are no
less worthy. Robert Thomson, News Corp’s
boss, is certain, for his part, that the Ber-
telsmann deal will alert trustbusters. Earli-
er this year America’s Department of Jus-
tice thwarted a merger of Cengage and
McGraw-Hill, two publishers of education-
al books. Any delay would be bad news for
Viacomcbs, which needs the money badly
for investments in video-streaming, where
it lags behind rivals such as Netflix, Disney
or at&t, a telecoms giant that owns hbo.
Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann’s boss, says
he is confident that regulators in America
and other countries will bless the deal.
They rarely block mergers that only reduce
the number of big players from five to four.
The last big union, Bertelsmann’s takeover
in 2013 of Penguin, did not fall foul of anti-
trust guardians. Moreover, the leading five
have lost market share in recent years to
smaller rivals, not to mention Amazon,
which these days not only sells books (as
well as just about everything else) but also
publishes them.
That still leaves the question of whether
the deal is a good one for Bertelsmann. The
price was heftier than even Viacomcbs ex-pected.Covid-19initiallyhurtbooksales,
as it did other discretionary spending. “The
first five weeks [of the pandemic] were very
tough,” admits Brian Murray, chief execu-
tive of HarperCollins.
But with their pantries full, self-isola-
tors turned to fiction for escapism and edi-
fication. “People are always predicting the
decline of book publishing, but it has actu-
ally been very resilient,” says David Stein-
berger, chief executive of Arcadia Publish-
ing, a publisher of history books.
And Simon & Schuster is a prestigious
prize. It was originally set up in 1924 to pub-
lish crosswords, but went on to represent
Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and
Tom Wolfe. This year it made waves with
the publication of “Rage”, a ferocious ac-
count of Donald Trump’s White House by
Bob Woodward, a far-famed journalist, as
well as a tell-all memoir by the president’s
niece, a psychologist.
Nabbing Simon & Schuster is Bertels-
mann’s second coup in the space of a week.
On November 17th American and Canadian
readers set a record for first-day sales,
snapping up 890,000 copies of a new mem-
oir by Mrs Obama’s husband, also pub-
lished by a prh subsidiary. 7BERLIN
Bertelsmann snaps up Simon &
SchusterPublishingBook-binding
Double-entry book-keeping
Top publisher revenues, $bnSource:RüdigerWischenbartContent& Consulting121086420
1918171615142013Scholastic
HarperCollinsHachette LivreSimon&Schuster
PenguinRandomHouseAn expanded English version coming soon