How to Read People

Yesterday, I stopped by Barnes & Noble on the way home, and I couldn't help but notice it looked unusually crowded. I felt like I was at a jam-packed Toys ''R" Us or Wal-Mart rather than a bookstore. Then I remembered: It's the holidays, dummy! And I went on a good day: Magazines were 30% off, so I snagged a special edition of TIME , which focused on the psychology of relationships, and the latest edition of Lapham's Quarterly , which centers on none other than my favorite historical figure of late -- Alexander Hamilton. I later ventured over to the kids aisle and saw a Star Wars toy that I know my nephew will go gaga over. And I grabbed it just in time, as a kid came up to me and asked where exactly had I seen the toy. To his dismay, it was the very last item of its kind in stock. It was only one day after Black Friday and I had already gotten a taste of the holiday shopping frenzy that's sure to sweep the nation over the next couple of week...

Shoppers spent $10.4 billion at stores on Friday. While that may seem like a large number in and of itself, it's a rather tepid showing when you compare it to sales generated a year earlier. In 2014, consumers forked over a more impressive $11.6 billion. Moreover, store sales on Thanksgiving this year fell from just over $2 billion to $1.8 billion. So what's to blame for the drops, exactly? As you can probably predict, consumer behaviorists point to online sales, which jumped 14 percent on Black Friday from 2014. All told, consumers who took to the web for their purchases spent $2.72 billion. Not too shabby, right? And we haven't even gotten to Cyber Monday (Nov. 30), which is hands down the busiest e-commerce day of the year. Perhaps this suggests that people are getting tired of braving the crowds (and the elements) to snag a good sale in person. Reports of people camping out in stores and trampling over others to grab everything from TVs to denim jeans has like...