How active will holiday shoppers be this season? JLL has some good news for retailers: The company in its latest report predicts that holiday sales will grow this year by healthy 3.5 percent to 4 percent.
The survey, though, did find that shoppers of different ages are approaching the holiday season in different ways. According to JLL’s research, Millennials and Gen Xers prefer shopping in discount department stores and online. These younger shoppers are looking for bargains when hunting for holiday gifts, JLL said.
Baby Boomers and those consumers who are older than 70? JLL found that these shoppers prefer traditional department stores. And when they’re looking for gifts, the focus more on quality than price.
This means that Millennials and Gen Xers are more apt to spend their holiday dollars at stores like Walmart and Target and with online retail giant Amazon, while older shoppers tend to spend more time at department stores such as JCPenney and Macy’s.
JLL found that more than 60 percent of Millennials and Gen Xers ranked low prices as one of the factors that most influences where they shop. More than 50 percent of Boomers and older shoppers, though, ranked quality as one of their key factors.
If you’re a retailer, you might covet those Millennial shoppers. But JLL’s research found that more of these younger shoppers are putting strict limits on how much they will spend. According to the research, 30.8 percent of Millennials say they will spend $250 or less for the holidays. Only 10.7 percent of Baby Boomers, though, said that they, too, are budgeting such a small amount.
Overall, JLL found that 28.3 percent of shoppers are budgeting $251 to $500 for the holiday shopping season, while 34.5 percent are budgeting more than $750. JLL found, too, that 19.5 percent of Gen Xers and 23.8 percent of Baby Boomers will spend more than $1,000 this holiday season.
That’s a lot of shopping, and it should make for a merry season for retailers.
