The Quiet Season: The Freight Slowdown and How Businesses Can Stay On Top
The champagne has popped, the confetti flies in the air, and the fireworks are bursting in the sky all at the stroke of midnight. Yes, that can only mean it’s New Year’s! Yes, the new year has finally arrived, meaning everyone’s newest plans, hopes, and goals can now get started and then promptly chucked in the bin after a week has passed.
Life slows down during this time of year; people stay inside more from the frigid weather, the days are still shorter, and, most importantly, people’s wallets have been wrung dry. Thus, there’s less browsing, less buying, and less shipping. In the freight industry, this is known as the “Quiet Season,” when shipping volumes decline. With the end of the “Holiday Season” and the rush to get everything shipped before December 25th, people start to take a breather and slow down.
So what happens during this time? What do people, businesses, and shipping companies do once January arrives? We’ll go over what the “Quiet Season” is and what you can do to prepare for the new year’s arrival!
The Break From Shopping and Shipping
As mentioned before, many major holidays happen around the end of the year, and people are buying gifts for all sorts of occasions. From candy and costumes to presents and tons of food, lots of money goes towards major celebrations during this time. It’s no wonder then that this becomes a highly profitable time of year, with 2024 seeing over $976 billion in holiday retail sales in the U.S. alone!
But once the new year arrives, many become very frugal. In January of 2024, retail sales dropped 0.9%. That may not sound like much, but when dealing with retail, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars not flowing into the economy! The slowdown in sales and traffic means businesses are stocking their stores less. Since stores tend to stock up during the holidays, they’ll likely end up with overstock once January rolls around.
Thus, the retailers’ goal isn’t to keep piling on more items, but to push that overstock so they can get as much profit out of it as possible. Retailers will try to accomplish this by marking steep sales on certain seasonal goods and holding off on shipping others. This then affects shipping companies and carriers whose whole industry revolves around shipping. With less of a need to ship product, the less business they do as a service.
However, this is not to overestimate the effects of this season. While profits may decline a bit, this can give ample room and time for businesses to learn and grow. Business owners should then take advantage of the opportunity and use the time to review how the year went, what could be improved, and what can be done to prepare for the new year!
Some Things Businesses Can Do During The Quiet Season
Slower sales mean more time for strategizing! There are many goals and strategies that businesses can do during this time. Here are just a few things that some businesses find helpful to do during this time!
Back to The Books
With more time comes more opportunities, so take this opportunity to plan ahead. Look at how you did overall in the previous year. Did you profit or run at a loss? What worked well for your business? What failed to meet expectations? Look at how you did throughout the year, how you did quarterly, and what trends stick out to you. Then, use the data that you’ve gathered to create a plan, highlighting how you want this new year to go and what your projections will be for the year.
Customer Retention
Whether they bought from your business five days ago or 50 years ago, what’s important is bringing back customers. Customer retention can be a difficult goal to maintain as customer habits constantly change. Openly communicating with your customers, whether through a blog, text notifications, or social media posts, helps keep your brand fresh and present in your customers’ minds.
Another thing that helps is having incentives that encourage your customers to buy from you more often, such as promotions and sales. Look at other stores and see which sales are working for them. Keeping up with marketing trends, strategies, and tools also keeps your business relevant to your market so that you aren’t stuck in old trends that get you less attention.
Make SMART Goals
Making plans and goals is always good, but you have to make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, or SMART. SMART goals help keep you steady and make planning easier and more approachable. We all want to achieve great things, but high expectations can sometimes cloud what’s possible. By staying focused and grounded, you are more capable of thinking about the kinds of SMART goals you can achieve rather than on things you can’t.
As mentioned earlier, one plan that people typically try during this “Quiet Season” is to use discounts and sales to push out overstock from the previous month. By making your plans SMART, it will make them easier to prepare for, like making sure you have the tools to measure what’s being bought and returned, or keeping discounts relevant by only putting sales on seasonal items or items that didn’t sell as well as you hoped.
These are just a few things that businesses can do during the new year downtime, but there are certainly more! That’s why it’s always good to take the time to think, plan, and experiment on what you can do for your business. Explore what competitors do, delve deeper into business tips, and utilize this time efficiently. It won’t last forever, so use the time while you can, because just as the holidays came and went so quickly, so too will the “Quiet Season”!
