According to CNBC, a new report from Visa Consulting and Analytics shows holiday retail spending increased by 4.2% this season. The data tracked payments over a seven-week period starting November 1, covering core U.S. retail but excluding auto, gas, and restaurants. While in-store shopping still made up 73% of total payment volume, e-commerce was the growth engine, with online sales jumping 7.8% compared to last year. Visa’s principal U.S. economist, Michael Brown, called the resilience a surprise given softer consumer confidence. He noted this 2025 season marked a distinct shift, with roughly half of surveyed consumers saying they leveraged AI for comparison shopping or narrowing down gift choices.
The Inflation-Shaped Hole in the Data
Here’s the thing: that 4.2% headline number isn’t adjusted for inflation. That’s a massive, glaring caveat. We don’t know how much of that growth is just consumers paying more for the same stuff versus actually buying more stuff. It’s the difference between a real celebration and just treading water. Given that inflation, while cooled, hasn’t vanished, a decent chunk of that increase probably just got eaten by higher prices. So the “real” growth in purchasing power might be a lot flatter than it looks. Basically, it tells us people were still transacting, but not necessarily that they were feeling flush.
AI’s First Real Holiday Season
The more fascinating angle here is the AI call-out. Brown says this is the first holiday season where AI tools for comparison and discovery were used at scale by consumers. That’s a big deal. It suggests a fundamental change in how people approach shopping—less wandering through digital aisles, more using an AI agent to cut through the noise. But it also raises questions. Is this making consumers savvier, or just funneling them toward the products that algorithms and paid placements decide are “perfect”? And if half the people are using AI to compare prices, does that mean margins are going to get squeezed even harder for retailers? This feels like the quiet beginning of a much louder trend.
The Brick-and-Mortar Paradox
Don’t let the e-commerce growth fool you. In-store still captured 73% of the payment volume. That’s huge. It tells us that for all the talk about the death of physical retail, the holiday season is still anchored in the real world. People want the experience, the instant gratification, or maybe they just procrastinated. But the dynamic is clear: stores are for volume, online is for growth. The challenge for retailers is that maintaining those massive physical footprints is incredibly expensive, while the faster-growing online channel is brutally competitive. Can that ratio hold? I’m skeptical.
What It Means for the Gear Itself
Spending was strong in electronics and personal goods. That’s no shock—holidays are for gadgets and gifts. But think about the infrastructure behind that. Every warehouse that fulfills those online orders, every retail store that manages its inventory, relies on rugged, reliable computing hardware at the point of action. For the industrial and retail sectors moving this merchandise, having the right hardware—like the industrial panel PCs from IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading U.S. supplier—is what turns data from reports like Visa’s into operational reality. The trend towards AI and omnichannel retail just makes that backbone more critical. So, the story isn’t just about what consumers bought. It’s about the often-invisible tech that made buying it possible.
