American’s spending on tchotchkes—trinkets, junk, yard sale finds, gift shop items, home decor trinkets and other decorative items for the home—is an excellent measure of their impulse spending, the fluff available in household budgets. It’s a good gauge of American’s economic wellbeing, rising when Americans are feeling economically flush and falling when they are feeling financially pinched. Back in 2007 the American Consumers Newsletter started to name tracking that spending the Tchotchke Index.
We dug into consumer spending data to show you what has been happening to the index since it’s 2000 peak of average household tchotchke spending of $240 (in 2013 dollars). It fell to a low of $158 in 2004 following the 2001 recession, 9/11 and the dotcom bubble, recovered to $226 during the housing boom and has been on the decline ever since to the low in 2013 of $103, 57% below its peak.
It is no coincidence that we have seen a similar long-term decline in location-based entertainment spending starting in the early 2000s, rising in the mid-2000s and then declining since – a pattern comparable to the Tchotchke Index. Many Americans continue to cut back their spending on not only tchotchkes, but other discretionary items including location-based entertainment.
About Randy White
Randy White is CEO and co-founder of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group. The 31-year-old company, with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, has worked for over 600 clients in 37 countries throughout the world. Projects the company has designed and produced have won seventeen 1st place awards. Randy is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on feasibility, brand development, design and production of leisure experience destinations including entertainment, eatertainment, edutainment, agritainment/agritourism, play and leisure facilities.
Randy was featured on the Food Network's Unwrapped television show as an eatertainment expert, quoted as an entertainment/edutainment center expert in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and Time magazine and received recognition for family-friendly designs by Pizza Today magazine. One of the company's projects was featured as an example of an edutainment project in the book The Experience Economy. Numerous national newspapers have interviewed him as an expert on shopping center and mall entertainment and retail-tainment.
Randy is a graduate of New York University. Prior to repositioning the company in 1989 to work exclusively in the leisure and learning industry, White Hutchinson was active in the retail/commercial real estate industry as a real estate consultancy specializing in workouts/turnarounds of commercial projects. In the late 1960s to early 1980s, Randy managed a diversified real estate development company that developed, owned and managed over 2.0 million square feet of shopping centers and mixed-use projects and 2,000 acres of residential subdivisions. Randy has held the designations of CSM (Certified Shopping Center Manager) and Certified Retail Property Executive (CRX) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
He has authored over 150 articles that have been published in over 40 leading entertainment/leisure and early childhood education industry magazines and journals and has been a featured speaker and keynoter at over 40 different conventions and trade groups.
Randy is the editor of his company's Leisure eNewsletter, has a blog and posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
