With the Christmas shopping season in full swing, the Siena College Research Institute has released a "Special Holiday Spending Survey."
What's on YOUR shopping list? And how many items are checked off? With 32 days of shopping between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, a new Siena poll finds 19 percent of New Yorkers plan to spend $1,000 or more on gifts.
Pollster Don Levy: "You know that's actually right about what we've seen the last couple years. When we look at intended spending overall, at least what people say they're gonna spend, looks about like it did last year. We see about half of New Yorkers saying they're gonna try to hold their spending under $500 and about 20 percent are gonna let it loose and spend well more than a thousand. So clearly, there's gonna be retail activity, there will be a great deal of spending, although again what we're seeing is that the intent to spend some of that money online continues to grow, and at this point about 40 percent of New Yorkers say they're gonna do at least half, if not all of their shopping online."
Ted Potrikus is President and CEO of the Retail Council of New York State. "Polls are always interesting. I've never quite been able to figure out how one can apply science to something that is essentially a very emotional and emotion-based experience, which is holiday shopping. You can tell people until you're blue in the face 'I am going to spend a thousand dollars,' and that's your upper limit, and then suddenly you get into the store and you see three other things that you want or you get online and you see three other things that you want. A thousand dollars is a great number."
Levy says when Siena did the survey 10 years ago, only 7 percent of New Yorkers said they would do half or more of their shopping online. "Well certainly it's convenient and more and more New Yorkers are telling us that that's what they're doing."
Potrikus points out New York retailers have adapted. "While the competition is steeper than ever, with the internet and with price-checking and with all of the different things that merchants have to do at the brick and mortar level to get people to come into the stores, so far so good."
According to a Hilton Honors survey, also released Thursday, New York shoppers are nearly 50 percent more likely to wait until the day before Christmas to finish holiday shopping, as compared with the national average. That would seem to favor area shop-owners.
Potrikus finds cold weather to be a key and a driver to get people out to local stores. He notes the busy time is yet to come and this weekend could be a very good one for retailers. "It's good to have decent weather on weekends, because particularly in the immediate Capital Region where there are so many stores, you have people coming from all over the place to do their shopping. Saturday and Sunday, those are the two days that you can make that longer journey, so if the road conditions are good, that's actually very helpful."
The Siena survey also found “Merry Christmas” to be a more popular greeting than “Happy Holidays” by 49 to 41 percent.
72 percent of all New Yorkers will put up a Christmas tree, but of those, 69 percent, up from 58 percent a year ago, plan to have an artificial rather than real tree. Again, Don Levy: "We do sit around the office a bit before we launch a survey and we look for something new. And this year we went after the highly controversial issue of fruitcake. There we found that nearly half, 44 percent, are inclined to say 'fruitcake is awful and I would never eat it.' Only about 32 percent say 'it's a delicious treat that I love.' But we really see a decided age variation. Those folks who like fruitcake tend to be older, about 65 plus. A plurality enjoy fruitcake. But when we get down into the 18- to 34-year-old set, this was an astounding finding of the survey, the largest single group, 37 percent, said 'I've never had fruitcake.' So the conclusion that we came to is that perhaps the great staple that fruitcake is is threatened at this point and that it simply is starting to die out as younger people are unfamiliar with the tasty treat that is a fruitcake."
The SCRI survey of Holiday Spending Plans was conducted December 2-6, 2018 by random telephone calls to 500 New York adults via landline and cell phones and 406 responses drawn from a proprietary panel of New Yorkers. Telephone sampling was initiated by asking for the youngest male in the household. Telephone sampling was conducted via a stratified dual frame probability sample of landline and cell phone telephone numbers (both from ASDE Survey Sampler) from within New York State weighted to reflect known population patterns. Data from the telephone and web samples were blended and statistically adjusted by age, race/ethnicity and gender to ensure representativeness. SCRI reports this data at a 95% confidence level with a margin of error of +/- 3.4 points including the design effects resulting from weighting.
