Economics of Christmas
[1][2] In Canada, merchants begin advertising campaigns just before Halloween (31 October), and step up their marketing following Remembrance Day on 11 November.
[3][4] In the United States, it has been calculated that about one fifth of retail sales[5] to one quarter of all personal spending takes place during the Christmas/holiday shopping season.
In other sectors, the pre-Christmas increase in spending was even greater, due to a November through December buying surge of 100% in bookstores and 170% in jewelry stores.
One economist's analysis calculates that, despite increased overall spending, Christmas is a deadweight loss under orthodox microeconomic theory, because of the effect of gift-giving.
Other deadweight losses include the effects of Christmas on the environment and the fact that material gifts are often perceived as white elephants, imposing cost for upkeep and storage and contributing to clutter.
In 2009, Lydia Yao, who graduated from Duke University with a bachelors of science in economics, provided another point of view to the topic of gift giving, by using a model to help measure the sentimental value of a non-monetary gift versus one that cost money.Christmas clubs are savings programs, the first of which were offered by various banks in the United States during the Great Depression.
For decades, financial institutions competed for the holiday savings business, offering enticing premiums and advertising items such as tokens.
The Dime Saving Bank of Toledo, Ohio, issued a brass token "good for 25 cents in opening a Christmas account" for 1922–1923.
In the 2007 edition of the catalog, half of the total number of pages was devoted to Christmas toys and the remainder focused on other store items including appliances, tools, clothes and jewelry.
[18] It is associated with a desire of merchants to take advantage of particularly heavy Christmas-related shopping well before Black Friday in the United States and before Hallowe’en in Canada.
In recent years, most major retailers have opened extremely early (increasingly even on the night of Thanksgiving itself, albeit not without controversy[21]) and offered promotional sales to kick off the holiday shopping season, similar to Boxing Day sales in many Commonwealth nations.
The purpose of this weekend is to revive the economy by encouraging consumption[27] and improve the quality of life of all Mexican families by implementing promotions and discounts in the prices of various products.
It was inspired by the American celebration, Black Friday and emerged as an initiative of Council of Business Coordination,[28] in association with the federal government and private sector organizations.
These markets originated in Germany, Austria, South Tyrol, North Italy and many French regions such as Alsace, Lorraine, Savoy,[29] but are now being held in many other countries.
The Act was introduced to the House of Commons by Kevan Jones, MP for North Durham as a Private Member's Bill on 7 January 2004.
Both religious groups and shop worker unions were against the idea of Christmas openings, leading to pressure on the Government to pass legislation to prevent the practice.
[37] Gifts that are least likely to be appreciated rely on personal tastes, and include items like perfumes and cosmetics, ornaments, and clothing.
It started unofficially in 1968, when Ellie Clark and her family decided to publicly disregard the commercial aspects of the Christmas holiday.
[38] Contemporarily a movement was created to extend Adbusters' Buy Nothing Day into the entire Christmas season.
[38] Buy Nothing Christmas first became official in 2001 when a small group of Canadian Mennonites created a website and gave the movement a name.
[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] Buy Nothing Day was founded in Vancouver by artist Ted Dave[49] and subsequently promoted by Adbusters magazine,[50] based in Canada.
