Before the biggest shopping season of the year even kicked off on Friday, the holidays — and promises of alluring seasonal sales — arrived at shopping centers across El Paso County.

Amid twinkling lights strung along storefronts and Christmas trees lined up outside grocery stores, magnificent posters in festive colors were already pasted to the front windows of several businesses by the weekend prior to Black Friday. In giant, exclamatory verbiage, they entice would-be customers to peruse their selection of goods and services to commence their holiday purchases.

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The deals are tempting: 

Holiday sale! BOGO 50% on everything!

Up to $350 off select computers!

Black Friday deals all week long!

Then there’s the litany of emails and text messages from retailers, advertising their limited-time sales for a Thanksgiving weekend that every year invites a shopping frenzy: Black Friday followed by Small Business Saturday followed by Cyber Monday.

Across the U.S., a record 183.4 million people plan to shop in stores and online this holiday weekend, an annual survey released Nov. 14 by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics found. Most of them — nearly 72%, or 131.7 million — will shop on Black Friday.

Consumers plan to shop because they don’t want to pass up good deals (57%), because it’s tradition (28%) and they like to start their holiday purchasing over Thanksgiving weekend (24%), the survey found.

Another survey the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics conducted in October found holiday spending is also expected to reach a new record this year. On average, a consumer will spend $902 on gifts, food, decorations and other seasonal items. That’s about $25 more per person than in 2023, and $16 more than the previous record set in 2019, according to the October survey.

Of the average $902 total, shoppers will spend about $641 on gifts, up from $620 in 2023.

While the holiday season is one of the most lucrative for retailers, it can pressure consumers to spend more money, and with more abandon, than they would at other times of the year. 

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Marketing tactics, planned purchasing, future discounting, emotional factors and social pressures all influence consumers’ tendency to binge shop, splurging on gifts and experiences this time of year, said Ying Zeng, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business.

She has studied consumer decision-making for the last seven years.

“At the end of the year there are so many big holidays all together: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. They’re associated with family gatherings, vacations and celebrations, making them feel more special,” Zeng said. 

The annual celebrations cause consumers to make different types of purchases every year: so-called ritual purchases of gifts and other commodities because of the holiday season; planned purchases, when a person knows they want or need a certain item and plans to take advantage of holiday discounts; and “sacred purchases” to express love and devotion for close friends and family.

“Emotion is a very important determinant for consumer decisions,” Zeng said. “This time of year holds a lot of nostalgia and sentimentality for people and we … are more willing to spend more (money) as an expression of love, making us sensitive to overspending.”

Fear of missing out on a special holiday deal or a new trend can drive consumers to purchase items impulsively, including those they may not have bought otherwise. 

“During holidays there are so many justifications to say, ‘Maybe today I’m not going to be a disciplined shopper. Everyone is buying that product, I’m worried not part of the trend, or I’m missing the deal.’ All these marketing tactics can create anxiety,” Zeng said.

This doesn’t mean holiday shopping season is purely harmful, she said. It helps many parties, including small businesses who can benefit from advertising their sales and brands through word of mouth and social media.

“They may not have as much exposure, but they have good quality products. Joining holiday sales and increasing the number of customers who visit and make purchases from them is a great way” to get more business, Zeng said.

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Shoppers can be more mindful when doing their holiday shopping by being specific about exactly which events or under what circumstances they will use a product they want to purchase. Zeng recommends consumers plan ahead to reduce impulsive shopping, such as making a strict shopping list and sticking to it.

Shoppers should avoid installment payment plans because they can be misleading and contribute to overspending, she added. People should think of purchases in terms of their total cost, rather than justifying the cost by breaking it down mentally. For example, people should consider they will spend $200 on an item rather than comparing the cost to 28 daily coffees at $7 apiece.

Lastly, Zeng advises people to consider a store’s pricing strategy and an item’s actual price, rather than just the reference price, to determine if it’s worth the purchase.