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It's my pleasure to welcome you here to the Clark Howard Show. Our mission is to serve you and empower you so you make better financial decisions in your life.

It's October.

It means the days are getting shorter. Oh, I don't like that at all, but it means something else.

I know I'm going to freak you out, but I told you months ago I was in a Costco in July and they already had Christmas stuff out.

So I don't seem quite as flaky to tell you that this year October is the new November for Christmas shopping.

I know it's crazy, but there's real value and I'm going to talk about why you should get your act together now to start doing your Christmas shopping.

Early bird's going to get the worm is I think expression always mess those up. Also, if you're out shopping, you're out dining, whatever, more and more places will not take cash and checks.

Oh, my goodness. I saw some stats from the Federal Reserve like nobody writes checks anymore and actually there's a good reason for that.

And then there's freaky stuff like Amazon at some of its locations, physical locations, doing a palm read for verification who you are and for your payment.

You ready to sign up for that or have your eyeball, verify you and pay for things. We're going to talk about all of that later in this podcast right now shopping for Christmas in October.

Well, why am I saying that we got the Amazon prime days coming up next week and a lot of other sales will be wrapped into that because retailers are terrified because back to school was a bust retailers get a sense about what fall and Christmas shopping is going to be like from how back to school shopping is in August.

And back to school shopping was weak. So they're really tweaking that all these goods they have to commit to buying like a year in advance for Christmas.

They got that inventory coming in and they were little more careful buying inventory for this Christmas season than prior.

But people are telling pollsters they're going to spend substantially less this Christmas and usually say yeah, yeah, yeah, people say that but because back to school shopping was weak retailers are front loading sales this year.

I mean, this is the fourth year that Black Friday no longer is a thing and Thanksgiving became just what it's supposed to be a holiday so you can watch NFL football.

But you know, now Black Friday is the whole month of November. But this year October is going to be more than a pre-lim. There's going to be a lot of deals going on.

Christa, I just saw a sale at the small electronics chain micro center 65 inch TV $299.

That's insane.

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