Word: holidaying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fledgling personal-trainer business. "My fear is that my ability to earn has fallen by the wayside," says Battelli, 53, of Westminster, Colo. As Christmas approaches, all that weighs heavily. "Come hell or high water," he says, "I'm going to make sure my children have the same holiday magic that I had as a child." He'll pay for the snowboard his teen son wants through "sheer will," and takes comfort in knowing he has a backstop of untapped home equity...
...PLACE IN THE SUN SLIM AARONS For decades Aarons was a society photographer for magazines like LIFE, Holiday and Town & Country. He made the jet set look fetching wherever it landed, from Palm Springs to Acapulco. (That's French soprano Lily Pons, above, at Cap Ferrat, France.) Aarons didn't mean to satirize those scrumptious creatures, their opulence or their strangely bewitching narcissism. All the same, it's hard to turn the pages of this book, brimming with rich folk in full regalia--with their silky red slip-ons, their bikinis and their short shorts--and not laugh out loud...
...shoppers are tossing aside such concerns, seduced by their image of what the holiday season should be, a buy-now-pay-later culture and price cutting that is so aggressive that when all is said and done, retailers may have sold a record number of things and still not made a dime. Heavy discounting is a dicey strategy, sapping profits and exhausting shoppers. An expected sale of $18 billion in holiday gift cards promises to keep the malls full in January. But then, says Ken Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board (which tracks the marketplace...
...TIME poll, 27% of respondents think the economy will deteriorate next year, while 26% feel it will improve. Some 38% said they are spending less this season, while 15% said they are spending more. Those mixed messages have economists puzzling over just what's making the consumer tick this holiday season. But they learn more about the science of shopping all the time, and a close look reveals how we are mustering the fortitude to spend our way through the economy's cross-currents...
...call it a major concern. But it's not as much of a drag on spending as you may think. Yes, consumers will spend $24 billion more on energy this quarter than in the same period last year, a 21% jump. That hardship is prompting some to rethink holiday splurges. But prices have come down from their post-Katrina highs, far enough to spur a spike in consumer confidence. For a while, says college student May Rashid, 22, in Fort Worth, Texas, "gas prices were taking all my money," and she planned to cut holiday spending. Now, with gas prices...