- With just two weeks until Thanksgiving, Business Insider teamed with global technology company Morning Consult to conduct a nationwide survey of American shopping habits during the holiday season.
- We analyzed responses from more than 2,300 adults across household income brackets, political ideologies, gender, race, and age to learn more about consumer sentiments around shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
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The holiday shopping season is almost upon us, and consumer sentiment around the national spending spree remains as varied as ever.
In order to learn more about shopping habits this holiday season, we teamed up with global technology company Morning Consult to survey more than 2,300 American adults about their gift purchasing preferences. This group included individuals across household income brackets, political ideologies, gender, race, and age, to paint a representative portrayal of national shopping strategies and planned spending in 2019.
Among the many interesting trends we unearthed along the way, one key takeaway is that Cyber Monday is growing in popularity over Black Friday, and that online shopping continues to outpace in-store sales and door busters.
Check out what else we discovered, below.
More than half of respondents plan to spend the same amount of money on gifts this year compared to 2018.
This holiday season, respondents who were left-of-center were 10 percentage points more likely to say they planned to spend less this season than their conservative counterparts.
Among men and women alike, clothing is a top gift purchase this year. For men, personal tech took the top spot, and women have their eye on toys.
The respondents were fairly split on planned spending during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
A majority of the survey respondents said they prefer to shop on Cyber Monday rather than Black Friday. Still, the wealthier someone was, the more they preferred Cyber Monday.
Actually, with the exception of Gen Z, all demographics expressed they prefer Cyber Monday to Black Friday. The older someone was, the more likely they were to prefer ordering online over fighting the in-store crowds.
Across most household income categories, shoppers plan to participate more in holiday shopping as the weekend goes on. A fraction of hardcore shoppers plan to head out on Thanksgiving, with larger fractions of respondents hitting the mall by Cyber Monday.
Millennials are the most active shoppers during the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, followed by Gen X.
During the holiday shopping season, we found an uptick in desire to shop online versus in-store compared to consumers' usual preferences.
