The unfortunate way Americans afford their Christmas spending sprees, and more!

How to tell your friends and family to have small or no-gift holidays

But an examination of retail sales data suggests that most Americans do not follow Michelle’s sage advice. We do the opposite. We spend first and ask questions later.

Americans barely cut back on spending at all in September. We nonetheless ramp up in November and unleash a wave of yuletide spending in December. Spending soars more than 20 percent — until the calendar turns and we suddenly sober up. In January and February, we slash our monthly outlays by about 10 percent until the credit cards are paid off and the emergency funds replenished. Then we resume normal spending until the next holiday season.

The steepest December jumps come in department stores, where spending doubles the average for all other months, and in book and clothing stores. But it wasn’t always thus.

Toy stores once ruled the yule, alongside the hobby and game stores that share the same retail sector. In the 1990s, spending at toy stores would almost quadruple during December. There was a similar bounce at gift and novelty stores, a now much-diminished retail category which, in the post-pandemic world, has pivoted to Halloween. Those shops now get their biggest sales from October ghouls, not December garlands.

What toppled toy stores from the top spot? As you doubtless guessed, our holiday spending has been swallowed whole by the same juggernaut that consumed the rest of retail: the internet.

The pandemic supercharged a takeover decades in the making. Online shopping took up a record 40 percent of the entire December sales increase in 2022, and the sector has almost single-handedly shifted much of our holiday spending into November. It accounted for 80 percent of the November spending boost last year.

But what do we cut back on in January and February to dig ourselves out of the holiday-spending hole? For each sector, we compared spending in each month to the yearly average, minus the December spike.

The steepest January cuts tend to come in gift shops, and in department, shoe and clothing stores, and spending there remains low in February — though you can see the first signs of recovery. For big-ticket purchases such as furniture and appliances, cuts in the first two months of the year actually exceed December spending increases.

Our favorite tiny data mystery here, though, is the one sector that doesn’t see flat or falling sales in January: bookstores. They do almost as well in January as they do in December.

What’s going on? We’ll give you a second to noodle. Are people redeeming heaps of bookstore gift cards? Are millions of us quietly returning gift books and buying better ones? Do folks just crave a good book to get them through the cold, penny-pinching winter?

Here’s a hint: Bookstore sales also spike in August and September — a time when almost no other business does well, with the slight exception of office supplies.

So instead of suffering a holiday hangover, bookstores appear to greet the new year with a rush of beginning-of-the-semester spending on campus. That’s got to be it, right?

Where is America’s bookstore capital?

Speaking of bookstores, if you’re old enough to remember our August column on the top states for writers, you can probably guess America’s bookstore capital. Vermont, which draws in more authors than anywhere else, boasts more bookstore workers, pound for pound, than any other state or territory.

It’s been at or near the top for more than 20 years, which is as long as we have sufficient data from the Labor Department’s much-beloved (in this department, anyway) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Neighboring New Hampshire and Massachusetts also regularly show up near the top of the bibliophile pile.

Another consistent contender, Utah, took second place in 2021, the most recent year for which we have relevant data.

Mysteriously, Illinois, West Virginia, Wyoming and Puerto Rico have recently joined the top rankings — four very different places that happen to be among the fastest-shrinking places in the United States over the past decade. (Wyoming actually eked out positive growth but has seen its share of shrinkage.)

Perhaps the combination of aging populations and lower demand for real estate has created more fertile ground for independent bookstores? Or maybe as other business recedes, independent bookstores are the last to hold on.

Looking at the metro areas with the highest bookstore employment didn’t help. Columbia, Mo., tops the charts as America’s bookstore capital, as it has for most of the past decade. If you can’t spot what’s going on yet, the rest of the top five are State College, Pa.; Morgantown, W.Va.; Bloomington, Ind.; and Blacksburg, Va.

College towns have always had a leg up in the rankings, but now they’re one of the few places where books remain big business — assisted, of course, by hefty sales of sports-team merchandise and other lines of business unavailable to your typical shop around the corner.

Beyond the captive customer bases on campus, American bookstores are on the ropes. Employment has fallen to a record low (outside of pandemic lockdowns) and the industry continues to sputter amid a strong economy, shedding more workers each month.

Split the data by the size of the business, and you see the industry got hammered twice — once when small and midsize stores were squeezed by the mega-chains in the late 1990s, and again following the global financial crisis, when Borders, Barnes & Noble and, presumably, the fictional Fox & Sons Books from the movie “You’ve Got Mail” faced their own reckoning at the hands of the internet.

For this, we’re using the Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics, a wonderful but somewhat delayed data set based on government records of just about every real business in the country. And by “real” we mean “it pays at least one employee.”

If there’s a bright-ish spot, it’s independent bookstores. Chains or shops with fewer than 20 workers now claim a bigger share of the industry than they have at any point in the last quarter-century, recovering all the ground they lost when Barnes & Noble and Borders pulled the rug out from under them in 1997.

The indies are shrinking, too, to be sure. But their decline is slow enough that they’re outlasting their larger competitors.

Does anyone still read?

What prompted the bookstore bloodbath of the past decade? Amazon deservedly gets much of the blame. But there’s more to it.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and the newspaper’s interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon’s board, but we’d be writing this even if they didn’t.

Because the data is clear: Beyond the impact of internet retail, bookstores are suffering because Americans just aren’t reading much anymore.

Reading for leisure hit a record low in 2022. Just 17 percent of us read for entertainment on an average day, down from 28 percent in 2004, according to the American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (This does not include reading to children, but it does include audiobooks and electronic books.)

To break it down, we’ll turn to Daina Bolsteins of Rockville, Md., who wrote in to ask about the demographics of reading. “I seem to know many women who are voracious readers,” she wrote, “but few men who fall into that category.”

Your anecdotal observations might as well be data, because you nailed it, Daina! About 20 percent of women cracked a book in the past day, compared with just 14 percent of men. And since 2018, men are responsible for most of America’s decline in reading — women’s reading habits remained relatively steady.

For a long time, Daina was also right about voracity. For almost all of this millennium, women who read spent more time with books than male readers did. But in the past few years, as male readership has dwindled to the truly hardcore hardbackers, the gap has vanished. Now men and women both spend an average of more than an hour and a half reading on days that they read at all.

Other demographic breakdowns hold fewer surprises. More educated folks read more, as do higher earners. Asian and White folks, groups that tend to have better access to education, also tend to read more than their Black and Hispanic peers. Asian readership, in particular, has resisted the decline we’ve seen elsewhere.

But in the contest of which demographics influence your reading habits, nothing compares with age. The older you are, the more you read.

Sadly, reading has declined sharply across the entire age spectrum in recent years. But there’s one notable, hopeful exception.

Reading among the youngest Americans, ages 15 to 24, is rising! While still quite low, it now stands at its highest level since at least 2001. And a BLS survey tracking household spending found that annual spending on reading materials almost doubled from 2018 to 2022 among households led by someone under 30, even as reading-material spending in older households flatlined.

So go ahead: Stuff those stockings with a good book this year. The teenagers in your life may even look up from their phones.

Hi! The Department of Data curates your queries. Are you curious about the most-covered song of all time? Or how much the average person grows (or shrinks) at each age? Or what Americans are doing if they’re not reading? Or whether remote work is bringing new mothers back to the workforce? Just ask!

If your question inspires a column, we’ll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week, we’ll send one to Daina in Rockville, who also asked about the proliferation of independent bookstores in the region. (She’s right about that, too: D.C. probably would have ranked in the bibliophile top five if we had sufficient data for 2021.) We also owe one to Gregory Silber in Washington Grove, Md., who commented disapprovingly on the DoD’s “goofiness” before asking an excellent question about the decline in chain bookstores vs. independent ones.