In our family, we draw names to find out who we are buying gifts for. We also put a dollar cap on how much we can spend. We did this to eliminate the possibility that anyone in our family might feel like they couldn’t come to Christmas because they couldn’t afford to buy gifts for everyone. We created this tradition years ago to make certain that our Christmas get togethers were first and foremost about enjoying our time together. Thankfully, it has worked for us. We love being together.
Even though we’ve removed the quantity component of gift giving, there remains the quality of the gift giving. Here, I’m going to continue with my theme of shopping awake. But first a few statistics on what Americans spend per year:
- $131 billion on women’s clothing
- $94 billion on men’s apparel
- $33 billion on weight loss products and services (while 65 percent of us remain overweight)
- $13 billion on chocolate
Add up just these four categories and we’ve spent $271 billion a year. To feed every starving person in the world per year? $13 billion. If you and I had a personal budget of $271 billion a year (don’t we wish?), I bet we would think nothing of allocating $13 out of $271 billion to world hunger. I’m thinking we could eke by on the remaining $258 billion.
Now, I know I don’t have a budget anywhere near a billion, a million or even a hundred thousand a year. But corporately, as a country, those are our stats. Each of us and our spending habits play a smaller or larger part in these massive numbers.
A few additional facts:
- Children see 40,000 ads a year, that’s over one hundred a day
- Over $15 billion a year is spent on advertising aimed at children
- The US has 5 percent of the world population, but consumes 30 percent of the world’s resources
- Average time spent shopping per week: six hours. Average time spent playing with children per week: forty minutes.
- Mini storage units are big business. The average American family has 7,262 pounds of stuff.
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