I’ve been somewhat disappointed by the early numbers for holiday shopping season.   The season has started off strong.  While a strong consumer is important to economy, I’ve been hoping against hope that Americans were ready to turn a new page in it’s book of consumerism.   It seems however that Consumer Americanus is still going strong.  Though early indicators show that the beast has evolved into a bit more of bargain hunter.

Personally, I’ve yet to start my holiday shopping, but I plan on doing it soon.   I don’t enjoy shopping, and I’m not very good at picking out gifts.  I hate giving bad gifts and as a result to go immense pains not give bad gifts.   Of course, I’ve taken the easy route to avoid giving bad gifts - I limit my gift giving to the bare minimum.   However, I do have a few people on my list that I do have to get some gifts for.  This year, I want to do it early rather than late and get it all out of the way.

Left to my own devices, I’m likely to do all my shopping online.  As much as I don’t like shopping even for myself at a mall or department store, I find shopping for gifts in the crowd of the mall even more loathsome.  This of course might be attriubutable to fact that I’ve found myself shopping on December 23rd of 24th 3 out of the last 4 years.  Picking from the dregs is never very much fun.   Hopefully this year, nobody will find me at Target this year at 7pm the night of Christmas Eve.