Shopping

Venture capital investor Charlie Federman took his daughters to a Paramus, N.J., mall one day and went home with an idea for an Internet business with the potential to deliver a coveted demographic: teenage girls who like to shop. Federman, a managing partner of Crossbar Capital, is the founder of PlumWillow, a website that piggybacks on Facebook to create a social shopping network for girls. Federman and Crossbar Capital provided the seed money for PlumWillow, and he put together a team of executives experienced in launching Internet and technology companies.

Holiday shoppers will be spending a little more this year, but as in recent years they'll continue to be disciplined and go online for better deals. Consumers are expected to spend an average of $582 on holiday shopping, according to Accenture's annual consumer holiday shopping survey, and 23% plan to spend over $750. About half expect to increase their spending by $250 or more, with only 5% saying they would be “extravagant” in their shopping and 8% indicating they would “splurge.” About 51% of those surveyed said they have already set aside cash for their holiday shopping.

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It may be a variant of other compulsive behaviors like gambling or overeating, and because of the recession, it got a lot more international media attention. The problem, as described by University of Minnesota psychiatrist Gary Christenson, is compulsive shopping. The typical compulsive shopper is a 37-year-old married woman whose family income is $65,000, reported Christenson, who studied 24 compulsive shoppers and compared them with 24 normal spenders.

Shoppers logged on in force for Cyber Monday, spending just over $1 billion at online retailers. It was the heaviest online shopping day in history, representing a 16% increase from last year's $887-million Cyber Monday haul, according to research firm ComScore. The shopping bonanza bookends the Thanksgiving weekend along with Black Friday. Whereas the day after Thanksgiving is associated with hordes cramming into malls at the break of dawn, Cyber Monday deals are designed to draw buyers online.

TEL AVIV - It's a bright Saturday morning and shopkeepers at the trendy Tel Aviv Port shopping mall are bracing for the thousands of Israeli families about to descend upon the city's busiest outdoor retail promenade. But among the first visitors many Saturdays is a city inspector, who goes store to store issuing $200 citations to business owners for violating Tel Aviv's ordinance against conducting commerce on the Jewish Sabbath. Small-shop owners fire off cellphone text messages to warn one another that the inspector is making the rounds; then they chase out customers and shut their doors until he passes.

It's the day after Christmas, and you're staring down a small mound of gifts you'd never ? not in a million years ? purchase for yourself. How to flip that reindeer sweater into a chic cashmere scarf without getting into a tangle with a salesperson? We asked Trina Gupta, founder of Los Angeles-based personal shopping firm Petite Style Studio, to give us her tips on how to return or exchange unwanted merchandise with little to no fuss. Delay and expect to pay "Time is the biggest factor when returning something," Gupta said, "because the stores want to be able to resell the product, and the longer you wait, the less relevant that product becomes.

Early this fall, James Reinhart noticed something odd happening at ThredUp, the children's clothing swap site the Harvard Business School graduate and his buddies dreamed up a year ago. Swappers started using the online exchange to trade toys. As the volume of toy trading increased, ThredUp decided there was enough demand to expand its service. The San Francisco start-up officially launched its toy exchange site Dec. 6, just as holiday shopping shifted into full gear. The turn of events at ThredUp signals how dramatically shopping is changing in the wake of the Great Recession.