The efforts that families and households will have to make after the Christmas holiday expenses will be significant. Not only because of what they have happily disbursed in previous weeks, but also because inflation and interest rates remain high, and GDP and employment barely grew in the last half of 2023.
But it is one thing that the first month of the year is, normally, more complicated than most, and another that the January slope continues to be a kind of annual via crucis. That is what has changed, and it has changed to the point that the effort we make after the summer and the effort we make after Christmas are increasingly difficult to distinguish.
The January slope has been partially smoothed out, because the reasons why it arose have been losing steam in recent decades. The first mentions of this phenomenon in the newspapers are found at the end of the 19th century in chronicles in which theaters complained that the public, having spent everything on Christmas, left the theaters empty during the first weeks of the year.
In any case, for this reality, corrected and increased, to expand to almost the entire society and to all businesses, as happened later, it was necessary for there to be an increasingly prosperous, numerous and inclined urban middle class to consume. The January slope, as we know it, would take many decades to crystallize.
Specifically, it all began in the 1950s in an incipient way, something that is easily sensed in the change in the spending patterns of the Spanish people. Thus, the per capita consumption of meat and paper and telephones per thousand inhabitants doubled, while the per capita consumption of electricity and sugar and the purchase of automobiles multiplied by three. Furthermore, the feeling began to spread that the worst of the hunger was being left behind.
Those deprivations had encouraged Franco to establish an extra Christmas payment in the mid-forties, which allowed many families to have, for decades, the feeling of having additional income before the holidays. An income that, when the payment was maintained also in times of prosperity, would help turn Christmas into a time of exceptional consumption for households.
If it all began in the 1950s (remember that pre-war per capita income did not recover until the middle of that decade), it was between 1961 and 1974 when the greatest increase in per capita income and private consumption in the history of modern Spain. It was then that televisions, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and record players arrived en masse in homes of which the Spanish had become proud owners. If, in 1950, half of the homes were rented, in 1981, these did not even reach 20%.
And if the diffusion of radio was impressive, that of television was not far behind. This invention, it must be remembered, not only became an object of desire for consumers, but also the medium that advertisers used to feed their desire to shop at Christmas and shape the very nature of the holidays. Santa Claus would have had it much more difficult without cinema or television to displace the baby Jesus and compete in Spain with the Three Wise Men.
Another fundamental ingredient for the consumer society, which would later consecrate Christmas as its most amazing and representative period, is the concentration of the population in the cities. Living near stores clearly facilitated and encouraged shopping, in general, and Christmas shopping, in particular. Shop windows, especially in the weeks before Christmas, became unavoidable “hooks” even for people less inclined to consume.
Between 1950 and 1980, the proportion of Spaniards living in cities with ten thousand inhabitants or less plummeted from around 50% to around 25% of the total. At the same time, those who did live in cities with more than fifty thousand inhabitants went, in those same three decades, from 30% to 50%.
Another important aspect for Christmas to become a great time to consume and give gifts has to do with the rise of stores, especially department stores. But we are no longer talking about palatial surfaces and authentic amusement parks that, in the spitting image of Paris, were installed exclusively in huge capitals like Madrid or Barcelona.
Department stores emerged as very spacious chain stores spread throughout the country. For example, El Corte Inglés began its expansion in the sixties with centers in Barcelona, Seville and Bilbao, and something similar happened with Galerías Preciados, victim of a growth plan so unbridled that, in 1979, it ended up in the hands of the Bank. Urquijo, one of his creditors.
At the beginning of the eighties, most of the main Spanish cities had department stores that strongly promoted Christmas shopping. To understand the overwhelming influence that these stores have had on the image of Christmas as a great moment of consumption, it is enough to observe that one of the main items of Christmas shopping has traditionally been toys. Well, six out of ten toys were sold in December, and the most popular campaign in modern Spain was Cortylandia, especially in the eighties and nineties.
The January slope cannot be explained without the crowning of Christmas as the quintessential moment of consumption for Spanish families. And the fascination of that prodigious moment cannot be explained without a new prosperity seasoned by extra pay, the advance of urbanization, massive and unprecedented access to millions of stores and products or the way in which brands and new department stores They have shaped, thanks to the universalization of radio and, above all, television, many of our desires and even the very concept and aesthetics of these festivities.
Of course, the January slope cannot be understood without the enormous consumer effort of Christmas, but neither without the annual increase in the prices of the many regulated services that the first month of the year brings us. The slope also became embedded in the collective imagination almost as a natural phenomenon thanks to the January sales, since these, which emerged, above all, in the fifties, came to mitigate overwhelming consumption that, as we were told, was inevitable. The main drivers of the national expansion of the January sales were companies such as Galerías Preciados or El Corte Inglés.
The flattening of the January slope, as well as the way in which it is becoming less and less distinguishable from that of September, is also due to the radical change that the scene has experienced in the last ten years. To begin with, there are already many who prefer to prorate the Christmas extra in twelve payments, and services with regulated prices have been reduced (where they still resist, there are many users who opt for the free market).
Even more important: the month of December as a prime shopping time and the January sales have lost steam thanks to the liberalization of sales and the successful emergence of the Black Friday week in November allowing Christmas shopping to be brought forward. The old massive liturgy of stores and crowded streets in December or a certain concept of Christmas have lost followers with the rise of electronic commerce and the commercial and cultural dethronement of department stores and conventional television compared to platforms like Amazon, Netflix, Disney or Instagram.
In short, the January slope has lost much of its meaning because Christmas is no longer what it was, because sales are no longer what it was, because neither the streets nor the shops are what they were and because not even the extra Christmas nor the increase in prices of regulated services have remained the same.
And if it is now confused with the September slope it is because of all that and because we Spaniards, let's admit it, have multiplied our trips and leisure in summer to the point that, if our grandparents did not want to die without visiting Spain, we have decided that Vietnam After all, it's not that far away.
