Oh how the holiday retail landscape has changed over the past decade. It used to be that folks would leisurely enjoy their Thanksgiving feast, sleep off said feast, then line up on “Black Friday” at the crack of dawn to get in on the big deals they were after. While the Friday after Thanksgiving is still the official start of the holiday shopping season, things have certainly changed. Thanksgiving is no longer off limits – many retailers are open. In fact, consumers can shop at stores or online before the Thanksgiving meal has been cleared from the table.

While Black Friday still holds its own as the most significant shopping holiday on the calendar, there are now a multitude of shopping holidays competing for attention. Between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday (we on the Porch always encourage shopping small and shopping local), Cyber Monday, Free Shipping Day and Super Saturday (the last Saturday before Christmas), it’s hard to know when the best time to do your holiday shopping is. These “holidays” were created to boost holiday sales and lure us in with the promise to save big on every item on our lists.

Here are some numbers to put things into perspective:

• The National Retail Federation expects holiday retail sales in November and December — excluding automobiles, gasoline and restaurants — to increase between 4.3 and 4.8 percent over 2017. Total spending is expected to range from $717.45 billion to $720.89 billion.
• According to NRF, for some retailers, the holiday season can represent as much as 30 percent of annual sales with hobby, toy and game stores reporting the highest percentage, accounting for approximately 30.1 percent of their sales during the 2017 holiday season. Overall, last year holiday sales represented nearly 20 percent of total retail industry sales.

Do you jump right in after Thanksgiving and knock out everything on your list? Or are you one of the 40% that begins holiday shopping before Halloween? Do you hold out for possibly better deals with the chance of not getting what you want? Or do you usually procrastinate and hope for the best? It takes all kinds!

The good news this year is that the gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas is long – 32 days whereas next year will only be 26 (although Hanukkah is early this year). That means retailers have more time to lure us in and those who usually wait to shop, well, you have more time to wait.

The forecast for holiday sales is good this year, but we’ll have to wait a few more weeks to see how the shopping season plays out. In the meantime, I’ve got some shopping to do!