How much Hoosiers will spend this short holiday shopping season
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
The holiday shopping season that officially starts on Black Friday is the shortest it can possibly be this year, but fear not! Americans will still find a way to spend lots of money.
How it works: Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday of November, except that one time President Franklin D. Roosevelt monkeyed around with the date and caused chaos.
- The earliest possible day we can turkey up is Nov. 22 — that's if the first of November is a Thursday — translating to a 32-day Christmas shopping season that runs from Black Friday through Christmas Eve.
- The latest possible day is Nov. 28. That's the situation this year, and it means only 26 days for official shopping.
What they did: Stanford economists Neale Mahoney and Ryan Cummings reviewed retail sales going back to 1992.
- Their research, shared with Axios, finds little correlation between total retail sales growth and the number of days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Zoom in: WalletHub's separate holiday spending study finds that sales this season are expected to grow between 2.5% and 3.5% over last year and surpass $980 billion nationally.
- The average consumer in Indianapolis is expected to spend $1,395.
- That puts the Circle City at No. 219 on WalletHub's ranking of holiday spending budgets out of 558 cities.
Zoom out: The Indiana city set to spend the most is Carmel. The Hamilton County suburb came in at No. 9, with consumers spending $3,424 on average.
- The most frugal Indiana city on the list is Bloomington at No. 556 with an average budget of just $419.
- Fishers is No. 24 ($2,910), followed by South Bend (307th, $1,178), Evansville (343rd, $1,107), Hammond (347th, $1,100) and Fort Wayne (490th, $805).