Is retail doing that badly?

Is retail doing that badly this season? At the stroke of noon, I received email from Talbots and  LL Bean inviting me to check out their clearance sales.  Yea, we're past the time any of the catalogers can deliver for Christmas, but  this is just a bit much.

This doesn't bode well for the quarterly numbers in retail--it looks like they're trying to get as much stuffed in the sales pipeline as they can before the quarter is over. If they can grab it from "brick and mortar" before the 26th, all the better.