How is it we're still spending so much?

I'm David Brancacchu in New York.

There's more to late November, early December, than spending.

Perhaps you're a household with a few doors open on the Advent calendar already.

That said, people in America spent more this year than last, especially online.

The data, though, is all over the place.

Adobe Analytics calculates we spent nearly $11 billion

online up 10% Black Friday. Salesforce puts it at $17.5 billion. And then there's MasterCard

Spending Plus, which finds online sales up just 3.4%. Consumer inflation accounts for 2.6% of that.

For context amid this all-over-the-place data, let's turn to Sucherita Kodali. She's

vice president and principal analyst at the research and advisory firm Forrester. Online has been outpacing the physical store sales numbers since the inception of the internet, really. But even today, what we're seeing is e-commerce

growing three times faster than physical store sales. So that's a trend that's been going on for

the last 20 years, and it continues to this day. What do you think is going on? I mean, you know,

the election results tell us that people were not in a good place,

feeling economically in a precarious spot, many people, yet a lot of people were shopping.

Is this people with means out there shopping? It had been a trend for some time. And in spite of that,

we've seen record levels of consumer spend and far outpacing

inflation, even across virtually every category with some exceptions, like maybe automotive

and furniture. But what is interesting is exactly that dichotomy between why are people

spending if they don't feel good about their personal

situation or if they're not confident in the economy? And there's an expression, we call it the

vibe session, which is that people feel bad, but they're not necessarily spending in a way

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