Americans Shift Away from Traditional Holiday Gift-Giving: Spending Declines by Nearly a Third Since 2000

(KNSI) – Data shows Americans are spending less on Christmas gifts over the last few decades, and experts don’t expect the trend to end.

Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota Professor Joel Waldfogel is the author of “Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays” and has studied the issue for 30 years. “Since about 2000, as we have continued to get a little bit richer, the actual holiday gift giving, the spending around the holidays, has fallen. And you can see that both and in retail sales data, and the difference between December and the months around it. So we seem to have moved away from gift giving.”

It has fallen by nearly a third since 2000. The big question is, why? “It’s a bit of a mystery. Some part of it is the shift toward giving through gift cards. So, if I buy you a gift card that doesn’t show up in December retail sales, it shows up whenever you redeem it. But the decline also shows up in holiday gift intentions in the Gallup data over time. So I think it’s more than just that,” said Waldfogel.

He speculates some other ways people are giving isn’t showing up, such as a family choosing to go on a vacation instead of spending a lot of money on the holidays. He thinks many people have become concerned about wasteful spending on presents.

Waldfogel says the problem with someone else besides you choosing for you is that they might not know what you want. “And there’s no surprise here. It turns out that things that other people choose for you end up being less valuable to you than the stuff you buy for yourself. So in some ways, for a very long time, holiday gift giving has looked like a losing proposition.”

The study looked at aggregate U.S. data on annual income and monthly retail sales from 1914 to 2020.

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