According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey, released in summary by NewStrategist, Americans spend 67 percent as much eating out as they do buying groceries.

According to preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper advertising expenditures for the third quarter 2003 totaled $10.9 billion, an increase of 1.5 percent over the same period last year, Total ad spending in newspapers for the first nine months was $31.8 billion, up 1.6 percent from the same period last year.

According to recent findings from Nielsen//NetRatings, senior citizens age 65 and older were the fastest growing age group online, surging 25 percent year over year to 9.6 million Web surfers from home and work in October 2003. Additionally, within the senior citizen age group, Nielsen//NetRatings found that the number of female seniors online jumped 30 percent, while male seniors jumped 20 percent.

"Gift cards are a great selection for the person who has everything," said NRF President and CEO Tracy Mullin. "They are more convenient than the gift certificates of years' past and they're no longer considered the 'lazy man's gift'-people love to get them." In fact, nearly 50 percent of consumers in an earlier NRF holiday survey said they would like to receive gift cards this year, up from 41.3 percent last year.

Emails, Hotmails and Messangers collectively reach more that 100 million visitors, while greeting cards and mail serves an audience of only 10 million the first week in November.

According to DRTV Quarterly, while most consumer spending trends are declining, ranging from minor corrections to catastrophies, DRTV continues to surge forward as the medium of choice because consumers respond to DRTV to the tune of $2 Trillion US worldwide, outperforming the global motion picture industry by wide margins.

AutoVIBES, the new monthly automotive omnibus study from Harris Interactive and Kelley Blue Book tracking new vehicle nameplates, reveals the models generating the most 'buzz' during October 2003. Among 26 new nameplates, four out of the top five are crossover vehicles.

Jupiter Research announced that it forecasts that online holiday retail sales will be $17 billion, a 21% increase over online consumer spending in 2002. Despite the fact that 46% of consumers stated they will shop more than four weeks before the holiday, Jupiter Research expects the convenience of online purchasing, the primary reason consumers shop online, to push purchasers to the very edge of the buying season.

According to The Media Audit, real estate web sites in 49 metro markets are attracting between 17 and 32 percent of those who go online, regularly or occasionally, during an average weekday. "The real estate web site audience is comparable to that of the automobile web sites, says Bob Jordan, president of International Demographics/The MediaAudit. In almost all of the Media Audit markets the competition is between Realtor.com, Apartments.com and the web sites of local dailies in each market.

The first in the "State Of Customer Experience" series by Forrester research, asking how do firms manage their experiences with customers, concludes that there's no one individual responsible for overall customer experience, and phone interactions get top marks in a survey of 110 US firms with annual revenues of more than $500 million.