Only 7 shopping days left!
Next week is “Super Saturday” (they seem to just make this stuff up every year) but I was not overly impressed by the crowd at the Wayne Town Center Mall yesterday. We were not even shopping, just picking up some cards and having lunch (the food court was packed). There were plenty of people, too be sure but, like us, they didn’t seem to be carrying very much actual stuff. The clear exception, in my brief trip into the mall, was the Apple Store – where they couldn’t have packed more people in if they were just giving it all away – boxes were flying out of that place!
As to the other stores, Tina no longer leaves the house to buy things for Christmas – AMZN ships everything for free (annual $79 Plus Membership, which includes movie rentals now) and has gift-wrapping and card-writing and often the best prices so it really doesn’t make sense not to use them.
Personally, I can’t buy like that – I need to see things and I kind of like poking around stores and talking to people but, then again, I also pay the people in the mall to wrap my gifts as I’m sure as hell not going to spend a day doing that (and, despite having spent my 16th Christmas working at the Macy’s gift wrapping counter – I pretty much suck at it). Fortunately, I’m grounded enough to know this is not how normal people behave – even in upscale North Jersey.
Grounding ourselves is why these surveys are so valuable. We have a lot of smart Members from all walks of life with combined centuries of experience – who better to ask about shopping conditions all over the country, and the World?
The official estimate from the National Retail Federation is that there will be $469.1Bn (pretty exact for an estimate) spent this holiday season, which is an increase of 3.8% over last year, which was a 5.2% increase over 2009 ($437Bn), which really sucked! Still, it did not suck so much that $469Bn is not an new record for Q4 shopping.
“After strong sales reports in October and November, along with a successful Black Friday weekend, retailers are cautiously optimistic that this season will turn out better than initially expected, bringing added stability to our recovering economy at
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