Dow Jones Today: Stock Futures Tick Higher to Begin Week; Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts Websites

Americans Are Already Holiday Shopping. Will They Find the Deals They Hope For?

17 minutes ago

Americans aren’t expected to slash their holiday budgets this year. But they may spend more time hunting for bargains—and find smaller ones than they hoped.

Consumers are expected to approach the year-end shopping season with the same thrifty ethos they’ve adopted for much of 2025 as they look to deal with tariff-fueled price increases, analysts told Investopedia. Keen-to-save shoppers have already started surveying deals well ahead of “Black Friday,” surveys show, but many are holding off on buying.

New National Retail Federation research shows what others have already spotted: Americans plan to shop resale markets, hunt for deals and cut back on some purchases. On average, Americans plan to spend about 1.3% less on gifts, food, decorations and other seasonal items this November and December than a year earlier, the NRF said.

“It’s certainly going to be a weirder holiday season, at least form a consumer and brand perspective,” said Andrew Waber, who studies U.S. transactions on Amazon for PMG, a marketing and digital services company. “Purchase behavior may be a little different than what you expect.”

Read the full article here.

–Sarina Trangle

Stock Futures Tick Higher to Begin Week

55 minutes ago

Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked up 0.1%.

S&P 500 futures rose 0.2%.

Nasdaq 100 futures were 0.3% higher.