Hrm. Do companies honestly believe that "Christmas in July sale" gets more people to buy heavily discounted toys than "July Sale?" Or am I missing something and it actually works!?

Although, I have been needing speakers with a decent Santa Claus hat...

I thought Santa came from the northern hemisphere? Or are you talking about him being on vacation? (sorry might be that I just woke up and nothing is making sense yet).

Their PR firm is probably celebrating right now - their pathetic promotion just made the front page of the largest consumer blog in the world. Remember, to a PR person, any PR is good PR.

I just bought a new bike a couple of days ago & I actually thought to myself
yesterday : "lucky me, Christmas in July".

Now a "Christmas in July" sale in August? Now THAT'S creative, Creative.

@scoobydoo: You're right. Before this posting, I didn't even know what "creative" was (or that it existed).

@3DaysTillTheState_GitEmSteveDave: Or just have a Christmas sale. You know, keep people on their toes.

Very tacky, who would want to indulge and encourage this by actually buying from them?

I would normally complain, but seeing as this is the coldest summer on record in Massachusetts, it feels like it's time for the Christmas ornaments to come out.

@Nick1693: Keeping on your toes is good and helpful sometimes. Like that time I woke up at 5am to feed our horses, went downstairs, and for some reason my Friday pills were gone. Then I realized it was Saturday, one of the two days I can sleep in b/c someone else feeds the horses.

@changed my name: Hm... THat's weird that people don't know what Creative was (or is). Creative was *the* digital sound company for most of my childhood... anybody who didn't have a SoundBlaster sound card was so uncool. Then they got buried when mainstream consumer electronics companies came out with their own devices and sound cards became unnecessary.

not seeing the huge deal here... Many stores do Christmas in July Sales. Even QVC turns all Christmas for a week in July. This isn't Creep, this has been around for a long time.

@3DaysTillTheState_GitEmSteveDave: I remember this Carlin video about keeping people on their toes.

It's Carlin so it's NSFW.

@pmcpa4: it's still tacky. Christmas season is Black Friday-December 25. Nothing more, preferably less. Hobby Lobby is in full Christmas mode already and will be that way until February. I can't go in the store during this time because I can't stand a Christmas assault on my eyes the week after the 4th of July. Who the hell needs Christmas stuff in July, anyway?

@pmcpa4: Thank you! I was about to post this also. MANY appliance, auto, and retail stores have been doing this for years now.

Just yesterday, my favorite radio station had their ANNUAL 4-hour X-mas in July programming on. And I loved it!
And to those who didn't like it? A big BAH HUMBUG to you!
;)

I had no idea Creative still existed. I honestly thought they died out in the 90s.

Why is Creative getting singled out for what's a fairly common practice at this point?

That would be marketing who comes up with the promotions. PR are the people that get to tame consumer sentiments after marketing is done. I haven't seen Creative products in years.

@pmcpa4: I second this! This is not creep... They are NOT starting Christmas season in July... That won't start until (checks watch) early October this year. This is just a schmaltzy summer ad trying to shakeup the summer sales doldrums.

I remember when the Creative Soundblaster Pro came out... and it had stereo sound... That is when computer gaming really started happening. Plus who didn't like having to configure their Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files just to get the drivers to fit into the 640k limit!

GOOD TIMES!

Crazy Eddies, an electronics outfit in the New York area used to have a Christmas Sale in August all the time in the 80s.

@sporks: Using your own complaint, people who make crafts, that's who. Especially time consuming christmas crafts, some of which are probably going to be given as gifts in higher quantities.

It takes me a good month to get my crafts done in my free time, so if I was into making christmas tsotchkes, and wanted to make 5 for people this year, I'd need to be in full swing making them.

Don't get me wrong, when other stores do it I can see the annoyance but crafts take time.

Hobby Lobby already has Xmas crap out. It's disgusting and truly obnoxious. It is a guaranteed way to prevent me from attending a sale.

Thank you for complaining about Creative, Consumerist team! The exact model of MP3 player I wanted to buy is on sale--score~!

@sporks: Not saying it's not tacky.... just saying it's been around for a long time. This is a non-story.

A) I agree that this is a non-story since so many companies do it. It's not like they're rolling on Xmas decorations, its just a common gimmick that one company shouldn't get singled out for. Posts like this just make active consumers look incredibly whiny.
B) For those of you that didn't know Creative still existed, it does and I LOVE THEIR MP3 PLAYERS. I've had two different models, one I bought in 2004 and one I bought in 2007. My old one was excellent for the price and capacity - lots of unique features and my new one is teeny tiny for the price/features/capacity of 30 gbs. Highly recommended to anyone wanting a non-ipod mp3 player.

@MichaelBrazell: Or unneeded. Creative's product line has become redundant in features and their software has become a hazard for any operating system on the market today.

The quality of their sound cards have deteriorated to the point that even their so-called X-Fi line cannot achieve the standards that the average computer user has come to expect. Back in their heyday, an AWE-64 made geek's jaws flop and drool-encrypted speech was the norm when around them. Today they cannot build a simple 6.1 card without making major mistakes, and the drivers are only on the CD itself. You lose that CD, you got a very expensive piece of plastic. The drivers online are either nonexistent or might corrupt your OS.
Their support ranges to their lousy support page, to 3rd party hacked drivers that unleash the features some of their cards come disabled with.

These days Creative is the exception than the norm. They didn't keep up with the times until it was too late and every one had systems with C-Media onboard sound or bought a better board like Turtle Beach (like me).

This is such a common practice now-

My boyfriend and I went into Hallmark this weekend to buy birthday cards for his nieces (17.99 for 2 cards by the way!!) and they were playing Christmas music already, in addition to having all of their ornaments and Christmas decorations out. They had Christmas tree cardboard cut outs all over the store. The funny thing was one of the associates had baked brownies and brought punch in for customers to "make up for having to listen to Christmas music in July while they shopped" as they teller put it. It was so weird!

This isn't Christmas Creep -- just an unimaginative promotion. Sears having their actual Christmas store up and urging customers to get a jump on their shopping is Christmas Creep.

Yet I still have no idea why anyone cares about Christmas creep in the first place.

Christmas in July? It's insane!

@Nighthawke: Creative Labs (contrary to their name) has been creatively bankrupt for a decade.

@Nighthawke: They suffered from their own power-mongering. By buying up competition, rather than competing on merit, they helped create an environment where they're kind of technologies were to be avoided.

Developers were wanting to ditch EAX ages before it was a viable option (the Doom 3 irony), and even Intel got interested in real audio support.

By focusing on value-added proprietary features, they accelerated their obsolescence.

Performance-wise, their stuff isn't bad for the money, but you can stick a nice DAC section on one of many C-Media, Cirrus, or Realtek chips, that have SOLID drivers (including good support on non-Windows platforms), and get wonderful sound, with no Creative Labs involvement.

@MichaelBrazell: You see...when I was a kid, you put a penny on your record player needle to keep your record from skipping. I even recall recording one of my favorite records onto an 8 track. Sucked though, because the track would change right in the middle of a song. Now THAT was high tech!

@BZMedia: they did die, but they still stalk th night for any [smaller] company willing to try to patent positional sound processing. Doom 3 finally presented a death knell (despite being a fairly crappy game :)), so hopefully this bum economy will shut them down, and E-MU will either spin off or go to a worthy parent company.

@BustangBetty:
maybe he lives in bizarro earth...where santa is from antartica and once a year he robs everyone

@Nighthawke:
not to mention that most CPU come with more than adequate integrated sound cards

@coren: I honestly would like to know when Creative hasn't been singled out for fairly common practices. People have always taken them to task for doing such nefarious things such as: purchasing other companies, defending patents, not having some features in their cheaper products, using marketing speak to make features seem more groundbreaking, and the worst of all... attempting to compete with Apple rather than just conceding the market. I am not trying to defend the practices as being good or anything like that, but rather just noticing it seems they are forced to play by a different set of rules than many other companies.

I suspect they are used to it by now.

Those prices are pretty much comparable to the everyday low price of buy.com and newegg. Maybe slightly higher.

@changed my name: Exactly, Creative has awesome products but their PR department sucks ass. Until they do something about it they'll never be competitive. Their mp3 players are awesome, hands down, but they don't "do well" because no one knows about them. Very sad.

@lmarconi: My Creative mp3 player fleet is awesome, I have 3 of them. I just wish the company didn't suck and that they would advertise and be more competitive. They could be great competition for iPod but they just don't work for it.

@BustangBetty: I think it's because the southern hemisphere gets it's colder season in the middle of the year as opposed to the northern hemisphere.

@Nighthawke: I will say that E-MU - a pro-audio brand that got gobbled up by Creative a while back - still makes good products (the 0404 is a GREAT card for somebody recording/producing music as a hobby), but their driver support can be kind of rocky sometimes. Unfortunately, that's the case with most pro-audio brands these days, including M-Audio.

Still, Creative can't be criticized enough for their strong-arm business tactics and their repeated shafting of the consumer to increase profits. They started off as an example of a stellar company, and became the leaders of the sound card industry; then their quality, customer support and business ethics fell off a cliff, and so did their reputation, market share and credibility. Seems like there's a lesson to be learned there!

@Harcourt Fenton Bug: Thanks for the blast from the past. I'd almost forgotten how entertaining those ads could be.