Marketplace · Monday, July 6, 2026
Marketing professor Kristen Deal notes a shift in sales patterns, with promotions starting earlier each year, a trend that began during the pandemic due to supply chain issues. Brittany Steiger, a retail analyst, adds that tariffs also encouraged early shopping to avoid price increases, leading to an 'always-on' shopping mentality fueled by ongoing inflation.
“Deal is a marketing professor at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business.”
“Everything's starting earlier. Christmas promotions before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving before Halloween and those things. It wasn't always this way.”
“Companies first started pushing early buying during the pandemic, when broken supply chains threw retail inventory into chaos.”
“That really triggered an early shopping mentality for parents, really trying to get ahead of those, um, pricing increases.”
“it's kind of evolving into this sort of always-on shopping mentality.”