Chapter 6
Case Study: Phenomenal Cosmic Powers, Itty-Bitty Living Space

In the middle 1500s, a Calabrian doctor named Aloysius Lilius invented a new calendar to fix a bug in the widely used Julian calendar. The Julian calendar had an accumulating drift. After a few hundred years, the official calendar date for the solstice would occur weeks before the actual event. Lilius’s calendar used an elaborate system of corrections and countercorrections to keep the official calendar dates for the equinoxes and solstices close to the astronomical events. Over a 400-year cycle, the calendar dates vary by as much as 2.25 days, but they vary predictably and periodically; overall, the error is cyclic, not cumulative. This calendar, decreed by Pope Gregory XIII, became known as the Gregorian calendar rather than the Lilian calendar. (They just use your mind and they never give you credit. It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.) The Gregorian calendar was eventually adopted by all European nations, although not without struggles, and even by Egypt, China, Korea, and Japan (with modifications for the latter three). Some nations adopted this calendar as early as 1582, while others adopted it only in the 1920s.

It’s no wonder that the church decreed the calendar. The Gregorian calendar, like most calendars, was created to mark holy days (that is, holidays). It has since been used to mark useful recurring events in certain other domains that depend on the annual solar cycle, such as agriculture. No business in the world actually lives by the Gregorian calendar, though. The business community uses the dates as a convenient marker for its own internal business cycle.

Each industry has its own internal almanac. For a health insurance company, the year is structured around “open enrollment.” All plans take their bearings from the open enrollment period. Florists’ thinking is dominated by Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. Upstream from them, Colombian flower growers center their agricultural year to produce the blossoms for those florists. These landmarks happen to be marked with specific dates on the Gregorian calendar, but in the minds of florists and their entire extended supply chain, those seasons have their own significance beyond the official calendar date.

For retailers, the year begins and ends with the euphemistically named “holiday season.” Here we see a correspondence between various religious calendars and the retail calendar. Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa all occur relatively close together. Since “Christmahannukwanzaakah” turns out to be difficult to say in meetings with a straight face, they call it the “holiday season” instead. Don’t be fooled, though. Retailers’ interest in the holiday season is strictly ecumenical—some might even call it cynical. Up to 50 percent of a retailer’s entire annual revenue occurs between November 1 and December 31.

In the United States, Thanksgiving—the fourth Thursday in November—is the de facto start of the retail holiday season. By long tradition, this is when consumers start getting serious about gift shopping, because there are usually a little less than 30 days left in the season at that point. Apparently, motivation by deadline crosses religious boundaries. Shopper panic sets in, resulting in a collective phenomenon known as Black Friday. Retailers encourage and reinforce this by changing their assortment, increasing stocks in stores, and advertising wondrous things. Traffic in physical stores can quadruple overnight. Traffic at online stores can increase by 1,000 percent. This is the real load test, the only one that matters.