Bargain-hunters fuel online shopping rise ahead of holidays

Online spending is on the rise ahead of the holiday season. Bank of America Institute senior economist David Tinsley sits down with Brad Smith on Wealth! to break down which consumers are driving this increase.

“Over the last two years, we’ve begun to see a rise in online spending again, and when we dig into who’s driving that, it’s the lower-income consumer. So we think, you know, in part this is around the stuff we’ve heard a lot about about value seeking, trading down that kind of thing… People are doing more online and doing more earlier,” Tinsley tells Yahoo Finance.

“This online spending increase is really them looking for these deals. And of course, you know, as everybody knows, you can cover a lot of retail territory online compared to sort of trooping around the mall, for example.”

The economist notes, “Generally, we’ve been quite upbeat the on the consumer. The labor market, for most parts of the consumer, is pretty robust. As you saw in [the] payrolls report, wage growth is still pretty solid, and they’ve still been spending. So I would probably err on the side of optimism that this pull forward, this early surge in online spending, isn’t necessarily cannibalizing spending later on.”

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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.