As the holiday shopping season gets into full gear, California consumers are intensively searching for deals.

I mean, they’re literally aggressively searching – online.

My trusted spreadsheet analyzed Californians’ online search habits over the past eight years through October, using Google Trends to identify the kinds of budget-conscious information they sought.

I developed the Stretched Wallet Index by analyzing search volumes for 12 phrases related to financial struggles. This index shows the combined fluctuations in searches for those budget-related terms.

California’s interest in thriftiness increased by 12% over the past year, according to the index. Now, online searches aren’t perfect indicators of consumer psyche, but this jump seems consistent with various reports of rising fi

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