Holiday Spending Plans
Families will spend over $1,000 on average this holiday season as shown in this Marimekko chart. Data from a survey conducted by the National Retail Federation categorize spending into gifts, which make up 63% of total spend, non-gift holiday items (22%) and other purchases for self and family (15%).
Family members will receive $506 worth of gifts on average, accounting for 50% of the total spend and almost 80% of the gift spend. Friends will receive $75, co-workers and others $31 each. Non-gift holiday items include candy and food $108, decorations $58, greeting cards and postage $28 and flowers $22. In total, the average family will spend $216 or 22% of the total holiday budget on non-gift holiday items. Other purchases of $155 round out spending.
According to the NRF survey, holiday spending will be up about 6% in 2018 from 2017. Other purchases are up 9.9%, gifts up 5.9% and non-gift items up 3.8%.
Here are the steps to make this chart:
Marimekko Chart of Holiday Spending Plans
How I Made This Holiday Spend Marimekko Chart with Data Rows
I used last week's Chart of the Week as a template for this chart. The Thanksgiving Dinner Cost Marimekko chart broke down cost into four bars (main dishes, sides, dessert and other) and included data rows for % of total and % change from 2017. I replaced the old data with this data copied from the NRF website:
Here are the steps to make this chart:
- start with the Thanksgiving Dinner Cost chart and replace data as above
- change colors of individual segments to make each segment a shade of the others in the same bar (using the default Modern palette in Mekko Graphics there are 5 shades for each color).
- adjust font sizes for labels
