(Finance) – Move the start date of the Summer sales, scheduled for next 6 July, to 21 July 2023, in consideration of the adverse weather conditions of recent months. It is to ask Phismthe Federation of Fashion Stores Confesercentiin a letter addressed to Massimiliano Fedriga, President of the State-Regions Conference.
“April and May – write i Merchants – were characterized by bad weather and from temperatures below the average for the decade, and June itself has so far been dominated by rains And unstable temperatures. An unfavorable picture, which affected the spring cycle of sales in the sector. In this situation, the start of the sales risks following very little or even preceding the start of the meteorological summer, effectively forcing the shops to put their entire summer stock ‘on sale’ without having had the opportunity to sell at normal price”.
“The approval by the State-Regions Conference of the single start date of the summer sales for the whole national territory, for the next 6 July 2023, is an important result. But the date must be postponed to July 21stto compensate for the uncertain weather which ‘slowed down’ the cycle of the seasons and the sale of bosses summer. A too early start of the sales would force us, in fact, to sell off before selling”, explains Benny Campobasso, President of Fismo Confesercenti.
“In general, i seasonal sales they should really start at the end of the season. It’s a battle we’ve been fighting for years. Now we need to continue working for sales to become end-of-season sales again and for a serious ban on sales promotional in the previous thirty days. Some have already put items on promotion. More than unfair competition, which we can no longer tolerate: we must stop it. We have to support a sector that has not yet recovered. After pandemic there was an immediate restart, but already in 2022 the spending of Italians in fashion has dropped again. She settled on 29.8 billion, almost 900 million euros less than the previous year, and still 5.3 billion euros below the 2019 values. We must put small shops in a position to survive, despite the increases in utilities and personnel costs. If this trend is not reversed, it will not be possible to avoid further closures in our sector: shops that have decreased by over eight thousand units in the last four years. It is an intolerable prospect, as the fashion sector has always been one of the greatest expressions of the Made in Italy”.