Festive Friday: Tips for covering consumer spending

With little more than a month to go – 34 days and counting –  until the holiday shopping milestone known as “Black Friday,” you might want to start shaping up your strategy for covering consumer and financial topics through the end of the year.  The next 10 weeks or so will be a bonanza of business feature possibilities and on a more substantive level, a measure of the ongoing economic recovery.

Consumer spending, of course, is still seen as key to solidifying the nation’s rebound, and it’s been on a sluggish trajectory.  This U.S. News report notes that the National Retail Federation’s forecast for holiday spending this year is up only slightly and in fact down a bit when adjusted for inflation.  On the other hand, here’s an interesting CBS Moneywatch article suggesting that any bump in spending is coming from wages rather than borrowing, another good sign.  The questions these articles pose bout conventional measures of spending, part-time work, unemployment and even tax withholding data are informative and ones you can translate in talking with local workers and employers when you ask them what their outlook is for the season.

Meanwhile, burnishing the traditional Black Friday story is getting tougher each year as what once was a concentrated post-Thanksgiving mania has been diluted in recent years by the effects of online shopping, of merchants starting earlier to get the jump on one another and of consumers fatigued with a once-lighthearted ritual that sometimes devolves into life-threatening stampedes.  And while it might not be practical to spurn coverage of the day itself, you can perhaps take a more contrarian eye this year and seek alternatives platforms for holiday shopping stories.  Indeed, the Wall Street Journal is just out with a piece debunking the very notion that the best deals are to be had by waiting in pre-dawn, turkey-fueled lines outside big-box stores.

Start bookmarking from among the plethora of Black Friday deals site, like BlackFriday.com, BFAds.net  and TheBlackFriday.com– they already are advertising promotions like the one Lowe’s is offering: a sneak peak at its Black Friday ad for those who register.  Also, sign up for frequent shopper programs at major chains from CVS to Kmart; your e-mail will become clogged but you’ll also be able to spot trends and patterns in loyalty programs and promos.  Same goes for restaurant chains, casinos and other consumer venues.

Now is the time to start thinking of and setting in motion any longitudinal coverage you want to do throughout the season, be it a reader/shopper’s personal finance diary of holiday spending, a deal-finder’s blog or a chronicle of how a few Main Street/local merchants fare as the Christmas countdown progresses.  You need to get these stories set up by Nov. 1 for maximum effect; readers love to come back and check in on whether, say, a new gift shop or sporting goods store is holding its own, or whether a bargain-hunting family is sticking to its budget.  (My main caveat: Demand documentation and proof; don’t let people fudge their own narratives. Make that a deal breaker from the get-go.)