Many Holiday Shoppers Skip Last-Minute Deals, Shop Early

For some grinches, it’s the most annoying time of the year.

The days after Halloween are often seen as a period of “Christmas creep,” where holiday songs suddenly take over radio stations  (opens in a new tab), festive displays start going up, and retailers start promoting holiday sales.

But there’s a reason why they do that: A bunch of early birds are out there, and they’re looking for a deal.

A recent study by the National Retail Federation  (opens in a new tab) found that about 40 percent of shoppers start looking for holiday gifts before Halloween, while another 41.5 percent start focusing on holiday shopping in November. And this isn’t a new trend—NRF says that 40 percent of shoppers have been eyeing early gift-buying for the past 14 years!

NRF’s Holiday Consumer Spending Survey found that a variety of reasons drive this bout of early shopping, including a desire to stretch out budgets (cited by 61.4 percent of respondents), avoiding crowds (48 percent), and avoiding stress (46 percent).

“There are millions of people who have this early-bird itch,” NRF spokesperson Kathy Allen told NBC News last month  (opens in a new tab).

(Perhaps this whole early-bird thing is why the outdoor retailer REI feels like its stores can take Black Friday off  (opens in a new tab).)

As CNBC notes  (opens in a new tab), companies have been quick to change their selling habits to attract early-bird consumers. Wal-Mart, for example, starts holiday layaway programs in August, and Amazon held its Prime Day  (opens in a new tab) earlier this year, which was seen by some analysts as an attempt to push the holiday shopping season into the summer months. (Christmas in July just got a whole new meaning.)

“We’ve now conditioned the consumer for it to be an elongated period of time,” Deloitte’s Rod Sides told CNBC  (opens in a new tab).

No word on how NRF or other retailers feel about radio stations playing Christmas carols so early in the year.