(Radio Iowa) – The holiday shopping season ahead will be expensive for consumers and lackluster for retailers, according to a professor in the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business who spent more than 20 years in brand management and market research. Professor Peggy Stover, director of the U-I’s Marketing Institute, says there are so many factors weighing down the economy as we head into December, there’s little optimism for the crucial economic month ahead.

“Last year, there was about a four-percent increase as a result of the holiday spending,” Stover says. “This year, because of all these factors, inflation, the tariffs, the government shutdown, mass layoffs in the private and the government sector, the industry as a whole, I’m predicting about a two-percent increase.” While some might view any increase in sales over last year as a plus, Stover says merchants should brace for essentially a stagnant season.

“It’s a significant decline to what the economy enjoyed last year,” Stover says. “A lot of it is going to be because consumers are going to be pulling back on their expenses because of the uncertainty that, right now, everybody’s facing.” A national survey estimates the average consumer plans to spend just under 16-hundred dollars on gifts during the holidays, that’s a ten-percent drop from last year. Stover says there’s just too much uncertainty, including over whether the federal government will be shutting down again in a matter of weeks.

Many merchants may struggle to get by for the first 11 months of the year, Stover says, then they’ll make up for it with the busy December. “With retailers, the end of the year, Black Friday and then all the other things that are going on in the marketplace,” Stover says, “this is the time of the year where a lot of retailers are making that big push to be able to make their sales.”

It’s been a difficult year for a lot of families in Iowa and nationwide, Stover says, noting about one-point-one million private sector workers lost their jobs between January and October, while DOGE eliminated perhaps as many as 300-thousand federal positions.