Feather boas, sashes, tiaras… no, it’s not a beauty pageant. It’s not even a bachelorette party, although between the giddiness and the flowing Champagne, that would be an easy mistake to make. Party planners and manufacturers of party supplies are raking it in selling everything from “decapitated groom” cake toppers ...

Apparently, there is no such thing as launching a winter holiday shopping deal too early. Thus far, early season promotions—layaway especially—have done brisk business for retailers like Walmart and Toys R Us. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, some of the earliest early season holiday promotions offered by major retailers have ...

According to the experts, the best explanation for why consumers wait in line just so that they can hand over money for the newest iPhone or a Black Friday doorbuster deal is that … it’s fun? A New York Times op-ed published over the summer declared in the headline that waiting ...

Only 42 days left until … the day you buy gifts that you’re supposed to hand out several weeks later. Black Friday used to serve as an unofficial kickoff of the holiday shopping season. The big day full of sales was a reminder that shoppers only had about a month ...

Talk about a comeback. For years, a roast chicken was the quintessential Sunday dinner, and Depression-era political campaigns invoked the phrase “a chicken in every pot” to symbolize economic prosperity. But in the ensuing decades, chicken’s cache faded as it became the also-ran protein in the fast food universe: It ...

Two new TV shows debut the week of October 15. While both are focused on extreme consumer lifestyles, the groups of people featured couldn’t be more different. Cheapskates and shopping addicts are the newest reality TV characters we’re being asked to watch—and who we’ll inevitably judge and feel superior to by ...

Move over, pumpkin. There’s a new taste in town that’s turning up in everything from booze to bagels: candy corn. Yes, that waxy, tri-colored childhood favorite is this season’s “it flavor.” Nabisco kicked off the corn-y trend when it released limited-edition candy-corn Oreos last month. The cookies, sold exclusively at ...

Halloween spending has been one of the few spending categories to quickly bounce back from the recession. And this year, the wild spending gets even scarier. According to the National Retail Federation, a record 170 million Americans will spend close to $8 billion on candy, pumpkins, decorations and costumes – both ...

Warm up your “delete” button. A new study about retailer e-mail trends shows that stores are sending messages to subscribers earlier in the season—well before the season even begins, actually, in many shoppers’ eyes. The e-mails are also being spewed out at a more rapid clip, averaging close to one ...

Based on all the excitement over Apple’s new iPhone 5, there’s no denying plenty of consumers just can’t get enough of their gadgets. But do some people care more about their mobile phones than they do about food—you know, the stuff we all need to put into our bodies to ...