Multimedia Reporting (Bradford-Noland)

‘Tis the season for shopping and this year gift cards are on everyone’s list. National gift card sales are expected to reach an all time high this holiday season.

Their widespread availability and convenience have made gift cards on 56 percent of consumer’s shopping lists. Local Lawrence boutiques do not expect to see the same national results but agree that popularity in gift cards continue to be on the rise.

What holiday consumers are buying in 2006

“I think the popularity in gift cards comes from the fact that they are more widely available and more people are seeing the benefits of using them,” Lynnae Edwards, Olathe senior, said. “They can be used at any time, they are convenient to transport and can fit the tastes of some of the more picky recipients on people’s lists.”

According to the fourth annual National Retail Federation survey (NRF), conducted by BIGresearch, sales in gift cards are expected to increase by about 34 percent. In 2005, sales reached $18.58 billion. This year, sales are expected to increase by over $6 billion and reach a total of about $25 billion.

Total national gift card sales

Joe Flannery, president of Weaver’s Department Store, 901 Massachusetts St., said his store has seen significant increases in gift card sales for the past four years. He saw a 20 percent increase last year and said he will continue to see figures rise this year. But for local boutique stores, like Britches, 843 Massachusetts St., gift card sales have not fluctuated since the beginning of the holiday season.

“I think our gift card sales aren’t increasing because we are a smaller store in a college town,” said Abby Blackwell, Britches manager. “Not a lot of people know we even offer gift cards.”

Some stores set goals for their gift card sales. Blackwell said Britches employees are instructed to remind their customers of gift card availability, but added that they do not rely heavily on these sales. Other chains, like Texas Roadhouse, 5901 SW Huntoon St., Topeka, Kan., have set goals for their employees.

Alyssa Moran, Texas Roadhouse employee, said Texas Roadhouse made $125,000 in gift card sales last year during November and December. This year, their goal is to sell $175,000 during the same months.

“It’s great for the company because 75 percent of the money comes back in January and February, which are generally slower months,” Moran said.

Stores receive this benefit from selling gift cards. Consumers purchase their desired amount but this purchase is not registered as a sale until its recipient redeems the gift card. The majority return in January and February.

“Most of our gift cards return right after the holidays. That’s when we have our larger after-holiday sale,” Flannery said.

The average amount spent by a single consumer is also expected to increase by about 32 percent. According to the NRF, the average consumer spent around $88 last year. This year, the average consumer will spend about $116.

“Our customers usually spend around $50 to $75 per gift card,” Flannery said.

“Usually, customers will come in looking to buy a pair of boots and realize that boots cost around $200,” said Tim Arensberg, owner of Arensberg’s Shoe Store, 825 Massachusetts St. “Instead, they usually end up buying a $100 gift card to help their friend or relative get closer to buying the boots they want.”

The business in selling gift cards has become popularized through sidewalk posters and TV advertising.

“At our store, our gift card sales rely on our advertising because we are a new restaurant in Lawrence,” Ron Green, Spangles assistant store manager, said. “Word of mouth is very important. We hope that people who like our store will let others know about our food by giving them a gift card for Christmas.”

Green has seen a lot of consumers come in to buy $20 to $30 gift cards. Spangles also offers a promotion that if a consumer buys a $10 gift card they can receive a $20 savings card.

“Our business is really busy during the holidays,” Green said. “We just hope that these gift cards bring in traffic after the holidays are over.”

Some consumers feel that buying gift cards is the easy way out but the majority does not care if that is true. In the same survey, about 80 percent polled said they planned on buying gift cards for Christmas and over half said gift cards are on their wish list.

“They are just easy because the person buying the gift doesn't have to worry about getting the wrong thing and the recipient doesn't have to worry about pretending to like something and then having to return it secretly for store credit,” said Elizabeth Tschetter, Borders sales associate.

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It may soon be possible to prevent some of the side effects of autism if researchers are successful at learning how to diagnose it at an earlier age. Researchers at the University of Kansas have geared their focus to finding what part of the brain is responsible for the impairments of this disorder.

Professor of psychology, John Colombo, and graduate student, Christa Anderson, are studying what happens when they show social and non-social video images to a group of autistic children. This study is measuring the amounts of norepinephrine, which is a chemical that elevates under stressful situations. This new study was prompted by their recent findings in September, which found that by showing social and non-social images to these children on a computer screen, their pupils responded differently than those who do not have this disorder.

“We know that they are not typically responsive towards social situations, but we don’t know why,”

Anderson said. “It may be that they are responding aversively or they are just not interested.”

Autism is a disorder that is characterized by its deficits in social interactions and patterns of unusual behavior. Six-years-old is the average age that children are diagnosed with this disorder. However, it is possible to diagnose children who are in between the ages of 18 to 36 months. But according to researchers, this is not early enough.

Steven Warren, director of the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, said that this research is centered on one of the biggest issues in autism research.

“The problem is that we can not trace this disorder among children at an early enough age,” Warren said. “We need to be able to determine which children have autism and which ones have it at a higher risk.”

Warren said that by determining whether a child has mild autism or severe autism can make a huge impact on the appropriate treatment given to the child. A child with mild autism can eventually live independently, but a child with severe autism must have constant support.

According to Warren, this research is one of the leading studies in autism and its findings are among the most recent.

The study analyzes the amounts of norepinephrine that are created after children are shown two types of video clips. The children being studied range in ages two to five. The first type of video clip involves social interactions such as children playing with one another. The second type shows inanimate objects. An example of that is watching toys dance to music.

After the kids have watched the video images, a sample of their saliva is taken in order to measure levels of norepinephrine. This measurement hopes to show whether or not a chemical imbalance exist among children with autism and whether or not they feel uncomfortable or stressful around social situations. This is believed to be the first time norepinephrine has been measured in order to study the effects of autism. So far, no data has been analyzed, but Anderson and Colombo hope to find a link between norepinephrine and autism.

When KU researchers studied the pupil responses generated by autistic children in September, they found that the responses were atypical. After the children were shown four images on a computer screen, their eye movements were studied with the use of an eye-tracking device. This measured where the children looked and for how long.

The images shown were faces of children and animals as well as inanimate objects such as toys and landscapes. The result was that the pupils of children with autism tended to constrict towards the images of faces. They constricted strongest towards the images of other children’s faces.

“We hope that someday we can find the physiological marker and possibly diagnose it at a prenatal stage,” Anderson said.

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Steve Ilardi’s phone is ringing. It is one of his patients. He hears weeping as he answers the phone.

“Remember how you made me promise to call you if I ever intended to kill myself?” his patient sobs on the other line.

“Yes?”

“I wanted to keep my promise.”

Click.

This is not the first time Ilardi has known someone who planned on committing suicide. With the steady increase of clinically depressed patients, many of Ilardi’s patients are diagnosed with depression at his small, psychiatric practice. This incident, fortunately, ended on a happy note.

“Luckily I have never had a patient go through with committing suicide,” Ilardi said. He said he talked his patient out of suicide after having found him hours later and then admitted him into a hospital.

Ilardi is an associate professor of psychology at KU and is involved with a continuous research study known as TLC, or Therapeutic Lifestyle Change. This is the first known research study to promote a change in lifestyle as an effective treatment for depression.

The percentage of depression patients has increased ten times since World War I. In the 1940s, 2-3 percent of the U.S. population suffered depression. Now, the percent is around 25.

Alarming statistics like this one pushes Ilardi to call depression an epidemic of the 21st century. And whereas many doctors offer drugs as their solution to the problem, Ilardi is not satisfied with this answer.

“If these drugs worked as they are advertised, I’d be all for them,” he said. “But these drugs don’t live up to their hype.”

On appearance, Ilardi, 43, is not an intimidating man. He wears a tie to work along with his worn out sneakers, standing somewhere between 5’6’’ to 5’7.’’ When his daughter’s puppy, Isabella, isn’t feeling well he will bring her with him during office hours. He endures the humiliation of playing Dance, Dance Revolution with his 9-year-old daughter, Abby, although he would rather be watching the NBA.

Oh yea. And he’s afraid of spiders; like, “run-away-screaming” afraid.

When he graduated college with a degree in math and economics, he started a 9 to 5 job and thought this would be the rest of his life. It wasn’t until he started feeling dissatisfied with his career and volunteered at a hospital treating mainly mentally ill patients that he ever thought of a career in psychology.

In college, he was one of those guys who made fun of the psychology students. He teased them and claimed it wasn’t a real major. He says he didn’t believe “mentally ill patients” were even ill. Why couldn’t these people just snap out of it?

In fact, depression had become a taboo subject in his family. Two of his immediate family members suffered from depression while he was growing up. And although he didn’t want to identify whom, Ilardi says this may have had something to do with his career change on a subterranean level.

Now, he is a respected psychology teacher who says he just wants his patients to get better. And in a society where drugs are number one, Ilardi’s study shows that only 40 percent of patients actually show a better response rate to the medications and only 28 percent of these patients completely recover. The medications studied are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (more popularly known as SSRI’s.).

In 2004, the FDA had to announce that these certain antidepressants, such as Zoloft and Prozac, increase the risk of suicide among children and adolescents. Other studies have shown a risk of suicide among adults, but no statistics have been formerly released to the public. These risks unease Ilardi and motivate him to continue in his research.

This study started about 2 years ago with a modest federal grant from KU of about $6000. The study promotes the concept Ilardi calls “environmental mutation.”

“We were designed as hunter-gatherers,” Ilardi said. “We were never designed for the 21st century life.”

The study is researching whether or not a change in lifestyle can help treat depression. So far, TLC has seen an 85 percent response rate from patients following these changes.

In a society where no one has to walk anymore, our food is grain fed, most people spend their days under fluorescent lighting, the average amount of sleep per night ranges around 6 hours and people use AIM as one of their only outlets for social communication, this research indicates that by slightly reverting to the hunter-gatherer days, depression might be treated and maybe even prevented.

“If the hunter-gatherers suffered from depression as much as we do now, I don’t think the human race would have even survived,” Ilardi said.

This change in lifestyle requires patients to increase their level of physical activity. Lawrence Athletic Center has donated free memberships to the study and the research offers exercise consultants to give their patients an initiative to workout.

Other lifestyle changes include receiving omega 3 fatty acids through natural supplements, absorbing natural sunlight, getting more hours of sleep and participating in more social activities, which decreases “alone-time” and reduces the chance to ruminate.

One of the project co-coordinators of TLC, Brian Stites, calls this the “grandmother philosophy” because of its basic objectives.

“It is something you probably heard your grandmother tell you to do when you were a kid,” Stites said. “These patients involved have tried everything. They have failed 4 to 5 other treatments in the past, including medications, and nothing has worked for them. This treatment is so simple and so effective, but it’s also a lot of work.”

And unlike Tom Cruise who publicly criticized Brooke Shield’s decision to take medications when suffering from postpartum depression, Ilardi says that’s not how he feels.

“I come at this from a medical standpoint. For Tom Cruise, he is religiously committed to this idea. For me, I just want to help people. Give me a drug that actually succeeds, and I’m all for it. But I haven’t seen that yet.”

Over two weeks of his abnormal psychology class covers depression. For Ilardi, this is another positive outlet to spread the word, and many of his students couldn’t agree more.

“The world is already over medicated,” Eric Travis, senior, said. “People need to learn to start taking care of themselves.”

“He is always thinking,” Kenneth Lehman, B.A. therapist for TLC, said. “He thinks while he sleeps.

The research is nowhere near complete, but Ilardi plans to continue until they have found all statistics that they can in order to save lives. And until then he will continue to teach, treat patients and answer the phone worried, afraid that this time it might be too late.

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The Riverfront Parking garage is part of the parking garage improvement plan this year. It will be one of the two lots improved. The project has already entered into phase one of construction, which is the improvement of the east side of the lot. But it is the deteriorating stairs that lead from the lower to the upper level that need the most improvement.

“The stairs were really beginning to age,” said Debbie Van Saun, assistant city manager. “This is just some maintenance work that needs to be done around Lawrence.”

The deterioration is because of aging and metal and concrete exposure that caused ice corrosion and cracking of the stairways. They will be replaced with pre-cast stairs. This will make it easier to repair the stairways more often in case of further damage.

The replacement of the two sets of stairs was bid on separately from the parking garage bids because of the type of work being done. According to Tracy Green of B.A. Green Construction, his company is handling this replacement. Their bid was $62,969, which is under the original engineer bid of $75,000.

The Riverfront Parking Garage was built in 1989 and has 510 available parking spaces. The third phase of this construction at the west entrance will keep about one-third of these spaces unavailable for a few weeks.

Offices at the Riverfront Plaza and other business such as Abe and Jakes Landing and the SpringHill Suites use this garage for customer and employee parking. According to Steve Bennett, buildings and structures manager, one of the busiest times for the parking garage is on Friday and Saturday nights at Abe and Jakes, one of the hottest bars in Lawrence. But businesses are not worried about any affect from the loss of these spaces.

“To my knowledge, no safety complaints have ever been received about the stairs,” said Alan Johnson of Abe and Jake’s maintenance repairs. “But you definitely don’t want to get one of your toes or your shoes caught in the metal.”

The parking garage off New Hampshire is the other lot that is under construction for this project year. The improvements for the two parking garages were bid on together with a winning bid of $316,701. As part of the city’s parking garage improvement plan, projects such as this one occur every three to five years. The funds come from Capital Improvement and Parking Reserve Funds.

“I’m glad to hear they are finally repairing those stairs,” said Alyson Beach, Winfield senior. “I always wear heels when I go out to Abe and Jakes and I am always tripping on those holes. You can never see them when it’s night.”

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It’s time to stock up on wigs, candy and beer. This year, college students are spending more on Halloween than any other age group.

Because of this increase in college spending, businesses are not depending on children to increase their Halloween sales. Instead, they are gearing their sales towards college students by giving them another excuse to party.

“When I passed the acceptable trick-or-treating age, Halloween didn’t excite me that much,” Alyse Smith, Topeka sophomore, said. “But when I came to KU, I got excited when I learned about all of the costume parties. I love taking pictures, going out, drinking with my girlfriends and finding an excuse to eat lots of candy.”

According to the National Retail Federation and BIGresearch, the total expected Halloween spending this season will increase by 50 percent. Last year’s spending totaled $3.29 billion and is expected to increase to $4.96 billion this year. This number keeps Halloween behind other gift-orientated holidays. With Christmas’ expected spending totaling $439.5 billion, Halloween remains sixth in line behind Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Easter and Father’s Day.

This is just money spent on the holiday as a whole. If you calculate how much is put into party spending, Halloween stands third behind New Year’s Eve and Super Bowl Sunday.

The survey showed that about 85.3 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds plan on celebrating this ghoulish holiday. This figure has increased 26 percent from last year’s 66.8 percent who planned on celebrating. Since Halloween lands on a Tuesday this year, business owners speculate whether or not that will bring in more or less business.

“It’s nice that Halloween lands in the middle of the week this year,” Kyle Billings, Fun and Games owner, said. “This will keep businesses from being overwhelmed by those last-minute shoppers who buys their costume the day before.”

Not many students will celebrate Halloween on Tuesday, but many students will celebrate it more than once Friday, Saturday or Sunday. But why has a holiday that consists of ghouls and goblins become so popular?

“Consumers see Halloween as a seasonal celebration to bridge the gap between the end of summer and the winter holidays,” Tracy Mullin, president and CEO of the NRF, said in an online press release.

Halloween has become a week-long celebration for some students. Visiting haunted houses has increasingly become popular. Admission tickets cost anywhere from $15 to $20.

Mostly, costumes and alcohol are the main ingredients for a student celebration of Halloween.

“This year, I’m going to be a mermaid,” Smith said. “It is actually the most I’ve ever spent on Halloween.”

Smith has already spent $40 on her mermaid costume, $15 on the extra material she is using to add character to the costume, $20 on the red wig, $25 on the accessories (shoes, boa and glitter), $5 on decorating her dorm room and $10 on candy. She also expects to pay another $20 on beer. In total, Smith will have spent $135 by the time Halloween is over.

Smith’s spending is above the expected average consumption. Among ages 18 to 24, the average consumer will spend about $59.06. This is a 16 percent increase from the $50.75 spent last year.

Costumes are the most marketed item for this season. At Party America, the average costume costs $40.

“This is our top season,” Larry Schloffer, Party America manager, said. “Costumes are generally more expensive than your average decoration. We sell a lot more costumes than anything else.”

According to Schloffer, over 50 to 60 percent of Halloween sales derive from costume sales alone.

For other stores, like Fun and Games, Halloween sales make up half of their year’s business.
Costumes alone make up for 85 percent of sales.

“Whether you admit it or not, everyone loves to have the opportunity to dress up,” Billings said. “Halloween just gives you that opportunity.”

Although many students may opt for buying their costume pre-packaged, many other students try to create their own costume from scratch.

“I always try to make my costume for free. Three years ago I made a suit of armor out of some 30 Bud Light boxes I saved,” Randy Laggart, Wichita senior, said. “So in a way, that costume cost me a lot in terms of money and liver damage.”

“Last year I spent $60 on an authentic ninja uniform,” Christopher DeBacker, Topeka graduate student, said. “But this year I’m going to be a cop, grow a moustache and wear my own clothes. All of my money will be going into beer this Halloween.”

Liquor stores are getting into the Halloween spirit with brews such as pumpkin beer. Approximately $8 for a six-pack, liquor stores even see an increase in sales during Halloween.

“There is a huge increase in traffic around Halloween,” Ian Johnston, Cork and Barrel manger, said. “Drinking has always been associated with the holidays.”

So, college students are taking over Halloween. It’s no longer trick or treat, but party and party.

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