Increases in Consumer Spending According to Gallup

I was looking at Gallup's 14 day rolling averages of consumer spending since they noted this year was down %21 from last year last week and I noticed something that seems promising.



If you look at last December, starting in November, from the lowest spending to when it peaked in January, it went from $74 to $87. That's a 17.5% gain.

So far this year, the increase has gone from a low in November of $63 to its current $72. That's an increase of 14.2% in spending so far and we aren't even done with Christmas spending so far.

We'll know in a few weeks if spending increased at a greater pace than last year during the same period.

(Updated December 19)

This years spending peaked a little later. Last year we peaked on December 5th. This years peaked on December 13th. We went from a low of $63 mid November at the start of the increase to a high of $79 dollar on the 14 day average on Gallup. That's a gain of of 25.3% in spending. The three day averages seem to be spiking less during this Holiday season as compared to last year. Lastly, last year the U.S. peaked at $87 and this year we peaked at $79 on the 14 day average. This means at peak time spending, there was only a 9% drop in peak spending compared to the 21% previously reported by Gallup as I noted at the top of this post.