Drive Your Own Holiday Sales Gains

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

Gallup says last month’s consumer spending marked the highest on post-recession record. True, “post-recession” doesn’t give us much of a backlog from which to mark historical sales records. But, the $91 per day that Gallup says Americans spent in September 2016 is a gigantic leap from the paltry $59 average daily September spending we saw in 2010. Consider that in September 2008, when we were on the verge of financial meltdown but not yet in the felt throes of it, consumers spent $99 per day on average in September.

Climbing consumer confidence and the spending that follows gives us cause for optimism this holiday season, but we should all be cautious about resting on forecasts and prognostication. The NRF (National Retail Federation), for instance, has offered another sanguine projection for holiday sales this year. Its growth expectation of 3.6 percent is just a touch shy of the 3.7 percent it anticipated last year, when actual holiday gains fell short at 3 percent. NRF hasn’t quite nailed it since 2014, when its projection aligned closely with reality following two years of really bad misses—including a 1.5 percent differential between it’s forecast and actual holiday sales growth in 2012.