I started at the Christmas Shoppe in November of 1971, when the original Mrs. Hofstadter, the founder, was still personally hand-pricing the ornaments she had imported from her cousin’s workshop in Garmisch. I was nineteen years old. I had been working at the dime store on Main Street for eight months and I was, in the language of the time, looking for something a little more steady. The Christmas Shoppe was, at the time, three rooms in the front of what is now the larger building. There was no parking lot. The cuckoo clocks were stored on the back porch.

I have been there ever since.

In the fifty-five years since, I have personally hand-priced approximately four hundred and twenty thousand ornaments. This is a conservative estimate. I have processed approximately one hundred and forty thousand transactions at the front register. I have wrapped approximately two hundred and ten thousand purchases in Christmas-themed tissue paper. I have, in the period from 1971 through the present, watched the founding Mrs. Hofstadter pass the business to her daughter, watched the daughter pass the business to her son, watched the son pass the business to his current niece, and watched the current niece consider, on three separate occasions, the question of selling.

The current niece has not sold. The Christmas Shoppe is still owned by the family that opened it. The Christmas Shoppe has, for fifty-five years, employed me.

What I want to talk to you about, in this column, is the discount.

You walk into the Christmas Shoppe in August. You have been in town for the day. You have already eaten at the Bodensee. You have already gone tubing. You have already had a beer at the Festhalle. You are, on the standard Helen tourist timeline, in the late afternoon of your day, and you have wandered into the Christmas Shoppe because, in your view, why not.

You see an ornament. The ornament is a hand-painted wooden cuckoo-clock guide">cuckoo clock, approximately two and a half inches tall, with a tiny brass weight and a tiny brass pendulum. It is priced at $26. You pick it up. You turn it over. You look at the price tag. You look at me. You ask, in a tone that is meant to be charming but that is, in my fifty-five years of standing behind that register, recognizable as the tone every customer uses when they are about to ask, whether the price is, in your phrase, “negotiable.”

The price is not negotiable. The price has not been negotiable for fifty-five years. The current Mrs. Hofstadter’s niece has not, in the time I have known her, given me discretion to negotiate the price of an ornament. The original Mrs. Hofstadter did not, in the time I knew her, give me discretion to negotiate the price of an ornament. The price on the tag is the price.

You ask me, in a slightly different tone, whether “the Christmas season” makes a difference. You mean, by this, that we are in August, that Christmas is not for four months, that the ornament will, presumably, be sitting in our inventory for some time before anyone with an actual Christmas-related use case will purchase it, and that I should, by this logic, be willing to release it to you at a discount because I should be glad to be moving the inventory at all.

I want you to understand the entire content of what I am, internally, responding.

The Christmas Shoppe sells ornaments year-round because Christmas, as a category, is not a season for our business. Christmas is, for our business, a continuous twelve-month operational tempo. We do not have a slow period. We do not have a markdown cycle. We do not have a clearance shelf. The ornament you are holding has been in our inventory since late February. It will, with absolute statistical certainty, be sold by the end of the calendar year. It will not, in the period between now and its sale, occupy a single day on a discount table.

The Christmas Shoppe has run no sales since 1979.

The 1979 sale was, by the unanimous account of the people who were here at the time, a disaster. The original Mrs. Hofstadter was persuaded by a junior employee that, in advance of a particularly slow autumn season, a 25% storewide markdown would meaningfully accelerate inventory turn. The original Mrs. Hofstadter agreed. The markdown was advertised in the Cleveland Times-Courier on October 17. The store was, on October 18, overrun. By October 22 we had sold through approximately 68% of the inventory at a 25% margin compression, and by November 11 we were, for the first and only time in the store’s history, out of cuckoo-clock ornaments. We did not have cuckoo-clock ornaments to sell during the entire month of November 1979.

The original Mrs. Hofstadter did not run another sale.

The current Mrs. Hofstadter’s niece, who has, in the past three years, been spoken to several times by various consultants who have suggested various “inventory-velocity-optimization” initiatives, has politely but firmly declined every single one of those suggestions. She has, in my hearing, told one consultant that the Christmas Shoppe sells the ornament for $26 because the ornament is worth $26, that the price reflects the materials, the labor, the shipping, the import duties, and the four-decade reputation of the Christmas Shoppe as the regional source of authentic Bavarian-style holiday ornament product, and that there will not be, under any circumstance, a discount.

I agree with the current Mrs. Hofstadter’s niece.

I tell you, in the polite voice I have been using behind that register since the Carter administration, that the price is the price. You set the ornament down. You make a face. You walk out. You go, presumably, back to the Bodensee, where you order a second beer, and you tell the people at your table that the Christmas Shoppe is, in your phrase, “overpriced.”

The Christmas Shoppe is not overpriced. The Christmas Shoppe has been priced, with the same internal-consistency of methodology, for fifty-five years. You, asking me for a discount on a hand-painted Bavarian ornament in August, are not negotiating in good faith. You are, in a small and corrosive way, undermining the entire economic premise of a year-round Christmas store. You are, in the most literal possible sense, the war on Christmas.

I will, of course, ring up the next person in line.

I will smile.

I will wrap the ornament in Christmas-themed tissue paper.

But I want you to know.

— Agnes