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55% of Female Consumers Indicate a Tighter 2012 Holiday Shopping Budget

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Retailers are quite possibly going to be in for a severe letdown this holiday season, as a majority of female consumers have indicated that they intend to spend less on the holidays in 2012 than they did in 2011. While the National Retail Federation has expressed a slightly more positive outlook (predicting a 4% bump in sales), women – who are the drivers of the economy – are not embracing the traditional “shop ‘til you drop” holiday spirit.

Hatchedit.com the free micro social network built around organization tools (shareable calendars, to do lists, etc), reached out to our user base for a holiday shopping survey.  Looking over the input from the audience of tech savvy female consumers who responded, we feel confident in warning retailers that they may want to lower expectations as we move into the holiday shopping season.

A full 55% of our respondents indicated that they would spend less on Holiday 2012 than they did on Holiday 2011.

That this population of women – famously termed “The rocket fuel of e-commerce” is still showing a lag in enthusiasm for spending in general may be the most accurate indicator of the US economy that we currently have.  (Certainly it has to be more accurate than jobs numbers.) Specifically, respondents to our survey (and the resulting white paper “2012 Holiday Shopping with the Tech Savvy Female Consumer”) indicated that employment distress, economic worries, and stricter budgeting all were leading to tighter holiday shopping constraints.   In short, after 4 years women are not yet feeling a “rebound”.

In fact, 59.7% indicated purchases will be influenced directly by what coupons they have, which means everyone is still looking for the best deals they can get.

So that should mean that Black Friday and Cyber Monday will see the enormous spikes in sales that have grown to be expected, right?  Not necessarily.

Brick and mortar stores hold little appeal for our tech savvy female consumers.  65.5% said that they would be doing MOST of their shopping online (even easier as this year there are 3 additional shopping days in the “Holiday Season”).  However, even Cyber Monday (although it was ranked the most important single sale day by our users) may be curtailed by the fact that almost half of the women (49.6%) said no single sale day would impact their shopping strategy.

How is this possible?

We believe the proliferation of daily deal sites (i.e., fab.com) and daily deal emails (i.e., StrollerTraffic), embraced by many retailers have created unintended consequences.

Traditionally, in a brick and mortar store the supply/demand concept is felt instantaneously when one sees that there is only one of “the perfect gift” left on the shelf.  However, generally speaking traditional online retail has found itself branded as an overstocked cyber warehouse with unlimited quantities of products and where consumers are hard pressed to embrace buying anything that they don’t feel they are getting at some discounted rate.  (Even free shipping is no longer an enticement, but a requirement for many consumers).

Add to that the fact that our respondents could not enthusiastically come up with any single item that was a “must have” gift to give this year, and shoppers are likely only going to be spurred to buying when they see they are not being played by “the house”.