We spoke about the approaching Christmas holiday with friends already and they all are saying the same thing, "kids only gifts". All of the adults are either not doing their usual gift giving or will do the Secret Santa thing. When our family was in closer proximity my mother in law would organize the Secret Santa by number selection at Thanksgiving time. Now that she's gone we probably will not do it anymore besides the fact that all of us are facing our own financial hardships of varying reasons. This year a strict gift budget will be the key for us.

Over the weekend I ordered some Custom Isotonix for my husband to help with his elevated blood pressure and a case of Friction Free for the shop which put his Preferred Customer maRewards up there around 2,000 pts so we redeemed those points for a free "SNAP pak" worth almost $65, pretty cool right? SNAP is the green cleaners that MA has had for forever which has a cute YouTube video. I needed a Disinfectant so the timing was really good for this freebie and most of his points were from these two items and maybe some Aloe & Digestive Enzymes earlier this year.

Okay, more later........

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UPDATE......okay its later. Kids are off to school.

I searched a little for predictions on the approaching holiday retail forecasts and only found articles from early spring, long before the financial mess that's now changing the entire credit & banking scenario. So many companies are folding or downsizing that these projections are surely not valid. For example, LinensNThings is going under, and who can keep track of all the other retailers in trouble, I guess we can look forward to a magnitude of pre-holiday Clearance Sales.

CyberMonday is still a month and half away from today but you can bet that were will be steep discounts to stimulate shoppers and people will be quite frugal with well planned purchases. A second stimulus package will probably launch before the end of the year to with the intention of helping consumers spend. Next year may be too late. Comparison shopping is going to be a primary activity for ensuring the best price as consumers holiday shop.

The Market America comparison search for real-time shopping prices will be an awesome tool and needs to have heavy promotion. I've been using it to shop for a LCD tv set since our living room set just went "green screen". Now we see everything tinted with green but since it shows a picture we're going to save up and shop for the best deal. I found that using the Google link for search doesn't do the trick but if you use the category listings from the sidebar menu and sub-categories THEN the comparison shopping feature works.

A new search results chart shows up with the merchant, maRewards points potentially earned and the price of the item searched for. I like seeing those results but found some details not posted on the chart but are on the sidebar search results in a new search by brand or merchant listing. I know Google & MA are still working on tweaking this feature so there's still hope for better detailed results from the homepage Google search.