As we examine the daily pattern of visits to our Retail 500 Index for the last three years we see that for most of the holiday season we trailed 2007 holiday traffic numbers, we consistently beat the 2006 holiday. However, that pattern changed for the days immediately after Christmas (is 12/26 the New Black Friday?) as 2008 matched the previous year and soundly beat 2006.

The interesting stat, however, is that by leveraging the new Hitwise tool for comparing custom demographics, the household income demographic bin with the strongest decline when comparing December 2008 to December 2008 is the upper bracket of those households earning more than $150,000 per year.

When we break-out the luxury retailers from the pack, we see a much more irregular pattern when comparing daily data year-over-year. We also see that there was a dramatic surge after Christmas for luxury retailers, possibly due to online bargain hunting.

While the demographic comparison reveals and even greater exodus for the $150,000 and over crowd, the surge in households earning less than $30,000 per year indicates increased aspirational window-shopping in light of economic turmoil.