Weekly Viz 2018-12-24

Average spending on Christmas gifts in the U.S. 1999-2018

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 1224

Merry Xmas! Happy Holiday yay! It’s always great to have holidays, and I almost forgot this week’s Makeover Monday lol.
This week’s data is definitely around Xmas. It’s about the estimated personal spend on Chirstmas gifts in the US from 1999 to 2018. Honestly ~$800 is a little bit higher than what I expected…
You can find the original viz here. But from visualization stand point, one thing I would like to call out is that it’s not a good idea to start your y axis not from zero – this will typically exaggerate the data fluctuation.

My Visualization

At the first glance of the chart, I was thinking, this trend should be in line with some macroeconomical stats. Therefore, I tried to plot it with several stats, and seems like it follows the same pattern as the US Median Household Income.

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Insights

• Average personal spend on Christmas gifts is in line with the real median household income – there are two obvious drops, one in 2002 followed by the dot-com bubble, and another in 2008 due to the financial crsis.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)