There’s no shortage of prognostications about what’s going to happen this 4th Quarter. Going into this season, 3rd Quarter retailer results were pretty mixed, with some big box stores (Walmart, Home Depot) doing well, while some fashion and specialty retailers did not-so-well (Urban Outfitters, Dick’s Sporting Goods). In the UK, the government’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that total retail sales volumes fell 0.6% in October.

But retailers tend to believe that a good quarter is just one promotion away. And for this year’s edition of the Big Daddy of all promotional periods, the National Retail Federation (NRF) predicted last week that almost 60% percent of shoppers definitely will or may shop on Thanksgiving, Black Friday or the two days that follow. Meanwhile, IBM has taken a different tack to prognostication, and has put its Watson platform to work to forecast top trending products (at this writing, the top things that people are buying are: Apple Watch, Samsung TVs, Sony TVs, the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, LG TVs, and Star Wars Legos — you can watch the trends too, by downloading the Watson Trend App from the Apple App Store).

Overall 4th Quarter sales are more of a measure of how consumers are doing than how particular retailers are doing. At this point in the year, retailers’ job is to react to whatever consumers demand, and so it’s important to see how well retailers do respond. So I plan on watching indicators of the overall health of our industry. Here’s my short-list of indicators:

Is EMV Clogging Up The Checkout Lines?

In October, I wrote a column for Retail Paradox Weekly (RPW) in which I quoted NRF ARTS Director Emeritus Richard Mader about his EMV experiences in the U.S. His take: “Can you say ‘long lines at Christmas’? ” That’s a good question! Adding fuel to that fire in another RPW column a couple of weeks later, my RSR partner Paula Rosenblum quoted some research data from Ingenico:

• 33% of card holders who’ve tried using EMV cards at POS did not know how to use them, and cashiers had to instruct them
• 60% of US card holders have received at least one chip card from their banks/card issuers (75% from American Express)
• Of the US card holders who have used both EMV and mag stripe, 54% prefer mag stripe
• 30% of those preferring mag stripe cards prefer them because they seem to be faster

The two-steps-forward-one-step-back implementation of EMV at checkout stands across America in October violates one of the most time-honored rules about technology in Retail: NEVER implement a big change anywhere close to the busy 4th Quarter. But that’s what we’ve done as an industry. Without getting into the details, look for mass confusion at the checkout lanes in the coming days and weeks. I don’t have any confidence that the implementation of EMV card payments has been done consistently or well across the country, so lack of big lines will mean that store-shopping is weaker than prognosticators hoped.

Will Shoppers Hit The Stores On Thanksgiving Thursday?

A lot of press coverage has been given to U.S. companies who have decided to give their employees the day off on Thursday November 26th to celebrate Thanksgiving holiday, especially REI. Besides the Washington state-based retailer, Money Magazine identified the following retailers who’ve made the same commitment: Academy Sports + Outdoors, A.C. Moore, American Girl, Barnes & Noble, Bed, Bath & Beyond, BJ’s, Bloomingdale’s, Burlington Coat Factory, Cabela’s, Christopher & Banks, Costco, Crate & Barrel, Dillard’s, DSW, GameStop, Hobby Lobby, Home Depot, Home Goods, JoAnne, Lowe’s, Marshalls, Men’s Wearhouse, Menards, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Orvis, Patagonia, P.C. Richard, PetCo, PetSmart, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sam’s Club, Talbots, T.J. Maxx, and Von Maur.

Good for them! But will consumers follow suit and stay home after dinner? There’s a consumer movement to boycott retailers that open on Thanksgiving Day, and one even has it’s own Facebook page. But few industry observers think that that will stem the tide of bargain-crazed consumers intent on getting there first.

Many industry observers point out that Thanksgiving Day sales tend to cannibalize Black Friday sales, resulting in less profitability for the big weekend because open retailers have to pay to staff the stores for Thursday. So, soft traffic on Thursday may not necessarily mean soft Black Friday weekend sales, but it might impact profitability.

Are ‘Cyber Monday’ Special Deals Getting Ordinary?

Many think that Black Friday is becoming irrelevant because of Cyber Monday. That term was dreamed up by Shop.org in 2005 to explain what at the time was a new phenomenon: online-only promotions. Since that time, the idea of online promotions has grown exponentially. But retailers are already monkeying with the concept, and nowadays Cyber Monday starts early — and you can expect that deals will extend beyond Monday. Walmart for example just announced that it will start its Cyber Monday the day before — the Arkansas giant even did a press release on it! Expect others to follow.

But does all the focus on one (or two, or…) day matter? Doorbuster deals are already available online now for many retailers, and Amazon launched a countdown to Black Friday in the beginning of November! Walmart answered with eight weeks of rollback sales starting in the beginning of November, and Target has encouraged its customers to use the Cartwheel app with a new deal each day with free shipping through December 25th.

It will be interesting to see if Cyber Monday loses its time-value for consumers as digital channel deals spread over the entire 4th Quarter.

Will Card-Not-Present Fraud Increase?

Last week, the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) reported data from payments processor ACI Worldwide that card-not-present (CNP) fraud had jumped 30% in the first half of 2015. What’s getting the blame? EMV in stores, and the increase in online transacting. This can’t be a surprise to any observer of the payment space. For example, RSR itself commented in its April 2015 benchmark entitled Retail Payments: Consumer Control And The Need For Speed that “the 2015 EMV mandate in the U.S. will shift the risks associated with electronic payments from ‘card present’ to ‘card not present’ transactions. “ Fraud experts say that the sure-fire way to fix this via tokenization of digital payments.

Look for post-2015 analyses of CNP fraud as both an indicator of how much business is moving online, and whether retailers have opened themselves up to a new cyber-threat as a result. But that thought about tokenization brings me to….

Will Apple Pay Get Big?

Yesterday, payment processor Square announced that its new contactless card reader is Apple Pay ready. Meanwhile in London UK, Mastercard is offering free public transit to Apple Pay users in London on Mondays between November 23 and December 14, 2015, in an effort to boost usage. Apple is the darling of consumer tech enthusiasts even if consumers ultimately opt for lower-cost alternatives (witness Droid phones over iPhones). It also happens that Apple Pay is a tokenized payment system. As I opined in last week’s RPW, Apple has the ability to define markets, and electronic payments is a market that is really ripe for disruption.

An explosion in Apple Pay adoption will be yet another indication that consumers are dictating the pace of change in Retail — just as they have been since they adopted smart mobile technologies to fundamentally change the way shopping is conducted, triggering Retail’s reset moment.