It’s the holiday season and we are all being inundated with new gadgets or great games to put under the X-mas tree. Do I pick the Xbox Kinect or will it be the iPhone 5 (wait, that’s not out yet). Aawww, what should I buy? I’m the techie in the family, but there are so many choices. If you are in the same spot, then you know describing the next gadget or game to the parents is impossible. Really, I just want Google maps on iPhone to show interiors like it can for Android – Do you know how many times I hear, I gotta find a bathroom now!
Well this year, I’m buying online and so are record numbers of others. Online purchases were up significantly from last year on Cyber Monday. ComScore put the increase at 22%, to $1.25 billion, while IBM Benchmark said Cyber Monday sales rose 33% this year. In any case, Monday marked a record day for online sales, and overall retail sales for the weekend also hit a record.
In addition, the Internet Advertising Bureau just released its third quarter numbers, with internet advertising revenues in the U.S. hitting $7.88 billion for the third quarter of 2011, up 22 percent from Q3 2010. This also is a 2.7 percent increase from the record-setting revenues of the second quarter of 2011. This is the eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth.
Even research firm Ipsos Mendelsohn recently finished a two-month project on the medium-to-upper crust and found that people making at least $100,000 are feeling better about the economy. But the super rich are really feeling better. The Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that although household wealth declined by 16% for the richest fifth of Americans and 25% for the rest of the country from 2007 to 2009, in 2009 the wealthiest 1% of U.S. households had net worth that was 225 times greater than the typical median household’s net worth.
So in the end, this means it’s time to get out there and stop shopping before your favorite choices are all gone!
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