Expect holiday bargains to be sparse this year, as retailers revel in the "pricing power" of short supply and heavy demand.

• Supply: "The number of out-of-stock messages online is up 172% compared with January 2020," The Wall Street Journal reports.
• Demand: U.S. consumers hoarded $2.3 trillion in pandemic-era savings, reports Axios' Hope King.

The big picture: "For retailers, the newfound pricing power — after years of rampant discounting and deflation — is boosting profits at a time when sales are still recovering from the pandemic," The Journal notes.

• "[C]onsumers should expect to pay closer to full price on a range of products this holiday season, including on Nike sneakers, Coach handbags and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts."

Reality check: Smaller retailers — who can't manage their own shipping networks and logistics — aren't reaping the same rewards, AP notes.

The small-business horror show includes:

• Vendors not honoring delivery guarantees.
• Shipping prices from China up 400% since last year.
• Wait times for ocean freight up 45%.

A second consecutive year of La Niña conditions favors a drier-than-average winter for much of the Southwest.

• Foreshadowing: The ongoing atmospheric river event is delivering far less rain to Los Angeles and San Diego compared to San Francisco, Axios' Andrew Freedman reports.

News outlets are increasingly willing to work together on big stories, Axios' Sara Fischer and Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian report.

• That includes the Facebook Consortium — the roughly two dozen news outlets who agreed to hold stories based on leaked materials from whistleblower Frances Haugen.
• The group was formed quickly and had to set its own publishing terms, which were hard to manage in real time.

This results in a blizzard of different headlines from the same raw material.

10 most popular Halloween costumes this year, via Google's fun FrightGeist tracker (tip of the cape to USA Today):

• Witch
• Rabbit
• Dinosaur
• Spider-Man
• Cruella de Vil
• Fairy
• Harley Quinn
• Cowboy
• Clown
• Chucky

Full list.