The Columbus Day sale — a longtime ritual for car dealers and department stores — is dead.
The big picture: Retailers are moving away from big sales events in general, and are especially eager to to distance themselves from this particularly disputatious federal holiday, which falls on Monday.
The intrigue: For years, states and municipalities have started renaming "Columbus Day" as "Indigenous Peoples' Day" to protest the legacy of colonialism that hangs over Christopher Columbus' so-called "discovery" of America.
- The last thing retailers want is to get caught in the culture wars.
- "I think this one is an easy one that they can just say, 'Hey, I'm just going to rename the sale or cancel the sale and not worry about it," says Katie Thomas, leader of the Kearney Consumer Institute, a think tank within the management consulting firm Kearney.
- Plus, fewer people get a day off of work for Columbus Day than in the past, so they don't have a long weekend to go shopping.
The Soprano crime family had a different take:
