Corporations after seeing how Black Friday netted over $9.8 billion: Uhhhh…no. According to these numbers, people LoVe the prices!
That’s almost 10 billion of sale prices though, for products they literally needed to offload.
And while a record amount, it was only 7.5% above normal, coming off all this Covid stuff it’s no wonder people are cutting loose and splurging a bit.
7.5% … Wasn’t that the rate of inflation recently as well? Not sure what it is at now, but we were getting up there. Higher prices wouldn’t necessarily mean a new record, I am guessing.
As far as I can tell it’s just people being “savvy” and waiting for the big sale day.
Black Friday e-commerce spending popped 7.5% from a year earlier, reaching a record $9.8 billion in the U.S., according to an Adobe Analytics report, a further indication that price-conscious consumers want to spend on the best deals and are hunting for those deals online.
Not the current rate of inflation. Inflation over the year from October 2022 - October 2023 was 3.2%.
To get to 7.5% you’d have to go back to the year from November 2021 to November 2022.
Our month to month inflation is currently about flat, meaning there was no change in prices from September 2023 to October 2023. But sometimes there’s a jump one month or a drop the next, it’s a little uneven, which is why people talk about the entire past year summed up. It’s a confusing way to phrase it though, because if you just say inflation was 3.2% in October, people often assume that means prices raised 3.2% in October. What it actually means is prices raised 3.2% over the entire past year altogether.
Anyways this is a true new record. People’s spending increases for black Friday are outpacing inflation.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/cpi-inflation-report-october-2023.html
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/
Above normal. The data suggests US citizens still have credit limit or not feeling the pinch as all the news articles suggest.
I was expecting a big decrease this year according to what I’ve seen on lemmy. From now on, I’ll read negative news and say “meh, probably not.”
It isn’t just lemmy, there’s plenty of external evidence showing that people think the economy is in a bad state. Changing your entire perspective because of big spending day on black Friday makes no sense.
Or they just know that Americans would rather go into significant debt, than having a lighter Christmas and/or buying less for a year or two.
First of all “lighter” does not mean “sad”. I remember, growing up, there were a few years where our parents would tell us that Christmas was going to be a little “lighter” this year due to whatever financial reasons that they didn’t want to burden us with. They were lovely every time, and there was absolutely nothing “sad” about it.
Second, you are presenting a false choice:
So it’s sad Christmas and lots of debt, or regular to light Christmas and still crushing debt.
It could just be a financially responsible Christmas where you learn to appreciate your family and loved ones. People will often make homemade gifts instead of buying them, and those are often far more memorable than many pricier gifts.
As someone who has been consistently been paying down debt (student loans mostly, but some CC thrown in there), it hasn’t ever stopped me from enjoying Christmas.
And this is coming from someone who isn’t even really a big Christmas fan to begin with. It’s fine. I just think you presented an absurd dichotomy.
I’m glad I have friends who can live without needing presents every year to feel validated on keeping a friendship alive.
I keep hearing other people just tear themselves apart because they worry about “ohhh I need to go shopping next week!” or “I can’t figure out what this person wants who barely gives a shit about me but I need to gift them SOMETHING!”
Like damn people, is it worth it that much to gift someone things at the cost of your own sustainability?
