Consumers should have plenty of high tech gadgetry to choose from when shopping for family and friends they really like this holiday season.
Electronics manufacturers are offering everything from “palmtop” planners to portable digital videodisk (DVD) players this year. And they’re showing these offerings everywhere from department stores to holiday-themed Internet shopping sites.
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In the fourth annual American Express Retail Index Holiday Shopping Survey of more than 800 consumers across the country, 57 percent of the people who said they’d be doing holiday shopping indicated they planned to buy some electronics. And this year spending expectations increased 8 percent over last year, with respondents indicating on average they would spend $915 on gifts.
The survey also indicated 84 percent of consumers would shop in department stores, while 44 percent would shop in electronics stores. The survey did not measure Internet shopping habits.
Most popular among the electronic items this season are expected to be software products, with some 49 percent of respondents saying that’d be their top purchase. Other popular electronics: personal/household appliances (41 percent), CD (36 percent), and video game systems (32 percent).
Children, according to the American Express survey, can expect mostly educational toys with 76 percent of respondents indicating that would be their top choice for kids. Forty-two percent said they would buy video games and 34 percent would purchase children’s computer software.
Electronic organizers and hand-held digital voice recorders should be among the top sellers at Staples in Warwick this season, according to the store’s general manager, David Nerney. With relatively affordable versions of the electronic organizers available at a price under $60 and offering memory capacity of 128K, Nerney said they are always big sellers.
Other electronic organizers offering 256K memory for keeping track of appointments, telephone numbers and addresses are also popular with customers despite carrying a price tag of about $100, he added. “Usually you can’t keep them in stock.”
Customers buying such gifts are typically planning to give them to a business executive or people who like electronic gadgets, Nerney explained. “They’re buying for someone who they think is going to get a lot of use out of it.” The old fashioned leather-bound planners, however, still do a brisk business and have not entirely been replaced by the electronic planners, he added.
Other popular electronic gadgets include several new lines of the hand-held digital voice recorders now available as well, including offerings from Sony and Panasonic that range in price from $79 to $100. The device doesn’t require audio tape to record, instead it uses an integrated circuit chip to capture shorter messages totaling roughly 10 minutes.
“If you’re driving, you can store information with this instead of writing it down,” Nerney explained. So-called palmtop computers, such as U.S. Robotics’ Palm Pilot III, are now becoming commonplace in stores such as Staples and Circuit City. A typical palmtop offering might have 4MB of memory and allow users to do spreadsheets, schedule appointments and keep a telephone number file. With a price tag of about $370, the Palm Pilot III “is a major purchase. It’s not just a let’s get a gift and finish our shopping item,” Nerney added.
For those who think big during the holidays, there are plenty of other high-end items to include on wish lists as well. There’s Panasonic’s PalmTheater, which is basically a portable DVD viewing system. It weighs about 2 pounds, measures under 6-inches-squared and just over 1-inch thick, according to specifications on Panasonic’s Web site. And it carries a recommended sale price of $1,399.95.
