For these retailers, the holiday season is crucial — and has deadlines

It’s the busiest time of the year for retailers, so throughout this season, we’re following a group of small businesses to hear how they navigate the holidays. We first checked in with these retailers back in November before all of the Black Friday sales.

This time, we called them up less than two weeks before Christmas — but that’s not the only deadline they have to worry about. In order to ship items from their e-commerce stores, the retailers also have to think about USPS’s holiday shipping deadlines.

Patty Delgado, Hija de tu Madre

Patty Delgado runs Hija de tu Madre, a Latina-focused e-commerce business based in Los Angeles, California.

December 16, 2019

“From now up until the 18th [December] are going to be our busiest days, just because we have to hit USPS cut-off times for shipping for these orders to arrive by Christmas.”

Gary Merriman, Fish Hawk

Gary Merriman opened the Fish Hawk, an Atlanta fly fishing store, nearly 46 years ago.

December 16, 2019

“Haven’t really seen what we call ‘desperate’ in the retail business yet. As you get closer to Christmas, you get people who have procrastinated so long, they get desperate, so they’re in just grabbing stuff. We haven’t seen that yet.”

Kristin Thalheimer Bingham, Dean’s Sweets

Kristin Thalheimer Bingham, along with husband Dean, run Dean’s Sweets in Portland, Maine.

“Our business is very busy right now. I think of it as ‘the nexus,’ when everything is happening at once. So we still have corporate orders, we have website orders that are still coming in, and people walking into the store.”