Ho Ho No: Fewer People Will Be Buying Gifts This Holiday Season

A Deloitte survey yields that fewer Americans will be buying gifts this Holiday season.

Nearly 12% of Americans aren’t buying gifts this year, an almost 7-point increase since last year.

However, in the mix, high-income households will spend five times that of lower-income households this holiday season, according to the survey, as reported by CNBC.

Bringing this depressing news back here to home … Will you be in the 12 percent or the 88 percent column this Holiday season?

We can no longer ignore the negative impact of the high inflation that is gripping our country.

The annual rate of inflation in the United States hit 6.2% in October 2021, the highest in more than three decades, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a likely factor for the spike.

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Remember, this number is deceiving because food and energy prices are not included. Our politicians purposefully remove these staples from the CPI, because it allows them to artificially under report the real negative impact.

Prices for food, petroleum, natural gas, etc. have skyrocketed this year. If these numbers were properly added, as they should be, inflation would be substantially higher.

The American people have to pay these exorbitant prices, whether the government properly reports the truth or not.

In a perfect storm, it’s not surprising that consumer confidence has also taken a big hit.

According to CNBC,consumer confidence hit a 10-year low in November, as measured by the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index.

Stephen Rogers, executive director of Deloitte’s consumer industry division, suggested the stark gap in holiday purchases from last year to this year "is a pretty good reflection of the tale of two pandemics, right?

"What starts off as a health crisis turns into a financial crisis if you’re in the lower-income [bracket]. Those of us who have investments in 401ks did quite well," he said. "You can see from 2019 to 2021, the lower income group is spending almost half of what they used to spend. And the higher income group is almost double what they used to spend two years ago, said Rogers.

SOURCES: Deloitte, CNBC, University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index.