The Day Of The Holiday Shopping Season Essay

In his argument, Leonard guessed that Black Friday shopping is degrading to America as a whole. Throughout the article, he states that people should avoid large sprees of retail spending “For the sake of the U.S. economy” (Leonard 165); he insists that voluntarily overbuying causes the country to

How are the main characters in a play constructed to represent the text’s underlying values and attitudes?

Black Friday is the following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Black Friday is not an official holiday, but many workers have the day off as part of the Thanksgiving holiday, this increases the number of potential shoppers. Retailers often decorate for the Christmas and holiday season weeks beforehand. Many retailers open extremely early, with most of the retailers typically opening at 5 A.M. or even earlier. Retailers use Black Friday to kick off the holiday season to use much of their products to go from the red to the black.

As Black Friday has progressed along with retailors marketing their products and their sales, it has become a national day of shopping to get the best deals. Americans mainly go shopping on this day to get huge deals for Christmas presents. Stores have even taken this great opportunity to open their establishments for 24 hours. Just last year, consumers spent a whopping $57,400,000,000 with each consumer individually spending $410 on average. The #1 retailor customers purchased from and camped out at was Best Buy. All of the statistics are based on 2013 and this year was projected to be an 11% increase.

“An estimated two-thirds of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) comes from retail consumption. Therefore, store closings and openings are an indicator of how well the U.S. economy is recovering after the Great Recession in the late 2000's.”[1]

In the United States, their are about 1 million outlets (stores), and numerous amounts of online retailers that sell items to the public. The demand in this industry is primarily driven by spending and interest rates. Due to this fact economic health affects consumer confidence and spending. But overall there has been a consistent trend of sales in the sector as a whole. Overall in the United States, the industry has a combined revenue of about five trillion dollars. Revenue (in current trading dollars) for retail trade in the US is to forecasted to grow an annual compounded rate of five percent between 2015 and 2019. In addition, total United States retail sales increased 2.1 percent in the first ten months of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014.

“The National Association of Federal Credit Unions (NAFCU) commissioned a study to examine what would happen to the U.S. economy if the presence of credit unions was reduced significantly as a result of eliminating the credit union tax exemption. The authors of the study are Robert Feinberg, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at American University; and Douglas Meade, Ph.D., Director of Research at Interindustry Economic Research Fund, Inc. Previous studies had demonstrated that changes to the credit union tax status in Canada and Australia led to a severe reduction in credit union presence. The resulting reduced competition for consumer financial services led to higher interest rates on consumer loans and lower interest rates on deposits for consumers in those countries. The results of the 2014 study indicate that similar impacts on consumers would be seen here in the United States should the credit union tax exemption be eliminated.” Some of the key findings are “Removing the credit union tax exemption would actually cost the federal government $15 billion in lost income tax revenue over the next 10 years. Gross Domestic Product would be reduced by $148 billion, and 1.5 million jobs would be lost over the next decade as well. The total benefit to U.S. consumers from the presence of credit unions in financial markets was $153 billion over the nine-year period of the study, or $17 billion per year.” (NAFCU 1) Taxing credit unions only results in costing the

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the forecasted expectations for economy sales in regards to clothing and clothing accessories stores edged up 0.8% in 2014, to $253.7 billion, versus 3.8% and 5.5% gains in 2013 and 2012, respectively. While purchaser spending has profited from pointedly bring down gas costs, we trust a movement in spending from nondurables to durables and, to some degree extravagance products, has contrarily affected attire deals, starting now there are no indications of unemployment growth.

After the Civil War the American economy became more and more industrialized, with many people and immigrants moving from rural areas to urban areas to find work in various industries. As a result of this rapid industrialization in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, there were many issues with this rapid growth. These problems included: unsafe working conditions, low wages, and very little representation for workers rights.

Even though you can get with your family and be thankful and then go shopping until your legs hurt it can go either way. We should not have Black Friday on thanksgiving because Thanksgiving is for sharing and being thankful and if everybody goes shopping what's the point of even having Thanksgiving then and you should be with your family during all of Thanksgiving not only half of it.

Holiday season accounts for a large percentage of retail sales, and retailers are expecting an average increase of 6% in sales this year compared to 2014 sales numbers. This increase is driven by the popularity of online discounts. Brick-and-mortar retailers are not expected to be as successful as

Buy nothing day, an annual holiday organized in Canada in 1992, was created to raise awareness of consumerism, by urging citizens to save their money for a full twenty four hours. By implementing this holiday into the United States, society, companies, and the environment would see many beneficial factors.

Our group narrowed down the myriad of industries by analyzing data within the consumer discretionary industry. During this analysis, the retail group peaked our interest because it represents a significant portion of the restatements that have occurred within the consumer discretionary industry. However, these restatements have significantly lowered from the years 2000-2015. We decided to delve into the matter further to try and determine why the retail industry has more restatements and why they have been decreasing in recent years.

The first Buy Nothing Day was established in 1992 in Canada, in which people were encouraged to not purchase any goods for the day to spread awareness of the negatives and consequences of consumerism; this event has been adopted as an annual day of spreading awareness of overconsumption. Although Buy Nothing Day was developed with good intentions, there are consequences and implications attached to this day of awareness and should be reconsidered.

Economists use the retail sales data in their models to make predictions on a wide variety of economic issues. Again, because retails sales accounts for such a large proportion of GDP, it is used along with other factors as a way to estimate the direction of the quarterly and annual GDP numbers. Used in conjunction with data such as the consumer price index, it is also very relevant for inflation forecasts as the data can offer glimpses into the affects of rising or falling prices. This in turn is closely tied to predictions for the direction of future interest rates as potential additional government action. Finally the retail sales data can be used to estimate