Humbug. Florida consumers remain glum as the holiday season starts, according to the latest University of Florida data tracking their mood, heading into Christmas only slightly jollier than during the bleak summer of 2008.
The consumer confidence index used by researchers at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research remained at 65 in November, matching October’s general malaise and only two points higher than the record low of 59 in June 2008.
The holiday gloom comes despite good news on gas prices, which dropped 7 cents in November, according to the center, and bucks national reports of a particularly optimistic Black Friday.
The National Retail Federation said this week that a record number of shoppers sought out deals on Friday, with more than 225 million people around the country in stores through the weekend, up from 212 million last year.
They spent nearly $400 each in the three days after Thanksgiving, also an increase over last year, though Florida-only figures were hard to come by.
There also was a bit of a silver lining: Florida consumers are a bit more optimistic about the outlook over time than they have been — they’re just not ready to be totally optimistic yet.
“Consumers are slightly less optimistic about current conditions than they were last month and slightly more optimistic about long run conditions,” said Chris McCarty, director of UF’s Survey Research Center in the research bureau, which conducted the survey.
The scale of the survey runs from 2 to 150 and is indexed to 1966, with that year’s value representing 100.
Of the five categories used to measure consumer confidence, two decreased, two increased and one remained unchanged. People’s perceptions of their own personal finances are lower than they were a year ago, but expectations that personal finances will improve a year from now went up.
The center said respondents’ overall view that the U.S. economy will improve over the coming year fell two points to 52, but their expectation that the economy will improve over the next five years remained unchanged at 67.
There could be, however, some good news for retailers going into the Christmas shopping season. Florida residents’ perception that it is a good time to buy big ticket consumer items like TVs or computers is up from last month’s survey.
Reports of economic activity, which often influence consumer confidence, are mixed, noted the bureau.
“The jobless rate for Florida, for example, remains high at 10.3 percent, though there was an encouraging three-tenths of a percent decline in unemployment from September to October,” the research center said in its report.
“Some of the new hiring occurred in the health and education sectors. An uptick in Florida tourism also spurred job creation in the leisure and hospitality sectors,” it said.
However, McCarty noted that increases in tourism may fade if financial problems in Europe and efforts to cut spending there decrease personal spending on travel abroad.
While home sales have gone up slightly, prices continue in a slump.
The median price for a single-family home at $131,550 is down from both September and October of last year.
McCarty also said that the prospects for overall recovery nationwide are heavily tainted by the economic problems in Europe, which some economists fear may eventually drag down the U.S. economy. McCarty predicted “sluggish growth for the next few quarters,” in both the state and the nation.