It may still be August with hurricane season in full swing but in the land of retail, this counts for very little. This is based on the below photograph that was snapped by an eagle-eyed shopper who visited the Belk store in Carolina Place, Charlotte. In fact, you couldn’t even call them ‘eagle-eyed‘, as the number of Christmas products was far from subtle.

This included a variety of different-sized Christmas trees, nutcracker dolls, and other festive ornaments. This shows that even though it may be blisteringly hot in many parts of the US, the retail climate never sleeps, especially when there’s money to be made.

Although many people are against shops putting up Christmas items for sale too early, there is also a method behind the madness. This is because the numbers don’t lie, and financially it often makes sense for shops to put out their Christmas produce early to improve sales in the build-up to the holiday season.

The aforementioned image was snapped and uploaded to the website Reddit where users discussed whether it was too early. Here the consensus was that this is now standard practice, and it wasn’t just Belk who were at it either, with a number of large and small stores also gearing up for the inevitable Christmas rush.

Unfortunately for the Scrooge’s amongst us, you’ll have to wait another 5 months or so until you can relax. For everyone else, at least you don’t have to worry about rushing your Christmas shopping.