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A Thanksgiving tradition since 1924, the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade has not quite turned 100 years-old yet. How is this possible you might wonder? Because it was skipped for three years1942, 1943, and 1944during World War II. Nevertheless, its 99th anniversary is shaping up to be spectacular. Heres everything you need to know about the (mostly) annual event in New York City, including how to tune in. The Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade by the numbers It takes many people to pull off the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Some even do the pulling literally.) There will be more than 5,000 volunteers working hard to make magic happen. This spectacle includes 34 balloons and 28 floats. There are also four “ballonicles,” which are essentially balloons on wheels. Lets not forget the 14 specialty units, 33 clown groups, 11 marching bands, and the one and only Santa Claus. The parade route begins on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and ends on 34th Street in Midtown. Whos performing at the 2025 Macy’s parade? Theres a little something for everyone this year. Elphaba Thropp herself, Cynthia Erivo, will kick things off with an opening number performance. Much to the delight of hip children everywhere, the singing voices of HUNTR/X from KPop Demon Hunters will also have a golden moment to shine. Broadway fans can look forward to numbers from Buena Vista Social Club, Just in Time, and Ragtime. Country fans will look forward to Lainey Wilsons vocal talents, and the Radio City Rockettes will high kick their hearts out. Thats just the beginning. There are also performances by Drew Baldridge, Matteo Bocelli, Colbie Caillat, Ciara, Gavin DeGraw, Meg Donnelly, Mr. Fantasy, Foreigner, Debbie Gibson, Mickey Guyton, Christopher Jackson, Jewel, Lil Jon, Kool & the Gang, Darlene Love, Roman Mejia, Taylor Momsen, Tiler Peck, Busta Rhymes, Calum Scott, Shaggy, Lauren Spencer Smith, Luísa Sonza, and Teyana Taylor. Its a jammed-packed event. What other celebrities are appearing? Beyond the performances, the parade will be a star-studded event, filled with athletes such as U.S. Olympian Ilia Malinin and U.S Paralympian Jack Wallace. Actors Kristoffer Polaha and Nikki DeLoach will also dazzle the parade route. Sean Evans will serve as a special correspondent What new floats will join the parade? There are six new floats this year making their way down the parade route. Science fiction fans look out for Upside Down Invasion: Stranger Things by Netflix. Travel lovers can look forward to The Land of Ice & Wonder by Holland America Line. Parade lovers young and young at heart will be excited for Brick-tastic Winter Mountain by the Lego Group. Rounding out the new floats are Master Chocolatier Ballroom by Lindt, Friends-giving in Pop City by Pop Mart, and The Counting Sheeps Dream Generator by Serta. What new balloons will join the 2025 parade? There are four new additions full of hot air to dazzle onlookers. Buzz Lightyear and Pac-Man will have their time to float, as will Shreks Onion Carriage and Mario. Additionally, KPop Demon Hunters fans should keep their eyes peeled for Derpy Tiger and Sussie, who will appear in midsized balloon and ballonicle form. How can I watch or stream the parade live this year? The parade airs today (Thursday, November 27), which is Thanksgiving. No matter your time zone, the action starts at 8:30 a.m. on NBC. NBC’s telecast covers those with traditional cable subscriptions and those with an over-the-air antenna with good reception. If you have the latter, you can watch the parade for free. The event will also be available on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming platform. If Peacock is not in your streaming arsenal, you can turn to a live-TV streaming platform that includes NBC in its bundle. Those include: Hulu + Live TV YouTube TV Sling TV Unfortunately, due to a carriage dispute between NBCUniversal and Fubo, NBC had been removed from that streaming service as of press time. Be sure to check regional differences before you commit to yet another monthly charge.
Category:
E-Commerce
Black Friday isn’t what it used to be. Less than 15 years ago, it was fairly common for people to wake up at ridiculously early hours to drive to a store, where they would stand in line, waiting for the doors to open in order to grab the best deals. Those people still exist, but not in the numbers they used to, thanks to the convenience of online shopping (and the early start to holiday deals). But as artificial intelligence becomes more entrenched, it could play an outsized role in Black Friday (and Cyber Monday)and 2025 could be something of a test case for the technology. The average consumer is expected to spend $1,595 on holiday gifts this year, according to Deloitte. That’s 10% less than 2024 and highlights the importance shoppers will place on bargains this year. And a growing number of consumers will be relying on AI to help them find those deals. Some 33% of the people Deloitte spoke to in its 2025 Holiday Retail Survey said they plan to use AI as part of their holiday shoppingdouble the number who did last year. Many say the tech could assist them with inspiration and product discovery. That could benefit retailers who have already embraced AI in their recommendation engines, as well as those planning to roll it out. “Consumer adoption of gen AI shows that expectations are shifting toward personalization and efficiency,” Deloitte’s report states. “Shoppers now expect instant recommendations tailored to their preferences, budgets, and recipients, raising the bar for retailers digital experiences. To meet holiday shoppers expectations, retailers could consider embedding AI-powered gift finders, style assistants, or deal copilots directly into their sites or apps.” A separate study from marketing automation platform Klaviyo found that 56% of consumers say theyll use AI tools during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. AI can do a lot more than just help people think of creative gifts, of course. Gen AI models like ChatGPT can research prices and recommend the best deal, in some cases even making the purchase for you, a feature used by a growing number of people. Traffic from AI platforms to retail sites during Prime Days and other sales in July was up by 4,700%, according to Adobe Analytics. And the company is predicting an increase in AI usage of between 515% and 550% this holiday season, compared to 2024. Thinking of enlisting a Gen AI to help you find deals? Here’s how to go about it. Make your list. Check it twice Chatbots dont work so well without specifics. You’ll need to know exactly what you’re looking to buy if you’re planning to use AI for price comparisons. Using the broadest example, telling ChatGPT you’re looking for the best price on, say, a Barbie or a blender is akin to calling a Best Buy or Gamestop and saying you want to know their best price for a game console. The $60 no-name brand that has a Tetris clone might technically be the correct answer, but that does you no good if you really wanted a PlayStation 5. Set the AI loose Ask your chatbot to find the best deals for your specific product. Again, details matter, so be sure to offer as much granularity as you can about the product. (To go back to the PS5 example, do you want the PS5 with a disc drive? What amount of internal storage do you want? Do you want a PS5 Slim or Pro or some other model?) It’s also worth asking the chatbot to suggest additional ways to save, such as applicable cash-back apps (like Rakuten), promo codes, or coupons. Fact check the results Prices change all the time during the holiday season, so just because ChatGPT says Store X has the best deal, you’ll still want to check that store’s website to verify the amount your AI assistant quoted is still valid. At the very least, using AI to help you shop will quickly eliminate some options and, ideally, free up some of your time, letting you spend less of November and December hunting for deals and more time enjoying the season.
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E-Commerce
Below, Corinne Low shares five key insights from her new book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Womens Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. Corinne is an economist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy. She also regularly speaks to and advises companies on their practices. Whats the big idea? Women face unequal demands at home and in the workplace, making having it all costly. Research shows how hidden factors shape choices and offers a way to reclaim time, energy, and joy. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Corinne herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Its not in your head; its in the data In 2017, I gave birth to my sonand had a midlife crisis. Things that used to work, like commuting two and a half hours to my job, just didnt add up anymore. I was constantly stressed, angry, depleted, and so tired all the time. Pumping in the Amtrak bathroom, crying that I would miss my sons bedtime because of a train delay, I wondered, Is it just me? I started studying womens time use, and the data told me I was far from alone. Women are getting squeezed from all sides. As our time in the labor market has increased, our time on home responsibilities hasnt declined accordingly. This is for two reasons: Mens time spent cooking and cleaning has stayed fixed since the 1970s. The way we parent has become much more intensive than a generation ago. Mothers in the ’80s were not babywearing and pumping at work or driving to a million activities. I grew up in the ’80s, and we were out riding bikes with no snacks and no water bottleswe must have been very dehydrated! The parenting game has changed. Some changes are great and have to do with our greater understanding of child development, but we spend almost twice as much time with our kids as compared to mothers only a generation ago. Without getting sufficient help from our partners, there just arent enough hours in the day. The amount our partners do also doesnt change when women are the primary breadwinners at home. Women who are the breadwinners still do twice as much cooking and cleaning as their lower-earning male partnerswinning the bread and baking it too. If you look at time usage over a lifecycle, you see womens time use on kids and housework swells to a mountain in our thirties (a period I call the squeeze), and the mirror image of that is our time on leisure and career investments, which goes down like a valley. During that period, time inequality with men is also at its peak. They do less childcare and housework and have more work and leisure time. We need to figure out a different way forward. 2. Your goal in life is utility, not career success The problems facing women in the workplace are structural. Were trying to be a Frankenstein of a super career woman at the office and an Instagram mom at home. We feel like were falling behind because were trying to do more (succeed in a world built by and for men) with less. But economists model human beings as maximizing not career success, not prestige, but their utility function. Your utility function is unique to you. Utility is like a firms profit function. Your personal profit function is made up of all the things that bring you joy, meaning, and fulfillment over the course of your lifetime. If you were to look back at your life when youre 85 years old, what would make you say, That was a life well lived? Your career is part of that, but its not the whole thing. Your utility function is unique to you. Only you know what brings you the deepest feelings of satisfaction. So, you cant compare yourself to someone else in terms of accomplishment because theyve accomplished different thingstheir utility function is different! Meaning, theyre maximizing something else. 3. A job is a tool to turn time into money Lets talk about where your career fits into your utility function. Your job converts time (the natural resource youre endowed with to maximize utility) into money. Your job is like an ATM; you put time into it and get money out of it. Ideally, it does this with minimal hassle and maybe some enjoyment, potentially adding to your utility rather than subtracting from it. But when I ask people what they would do with their time if money were no object, almost no one says theyd try to file more reports or climb higher on the corporate ladder. Thats because we recognize that a job is a means to utility, not an end. If we didnt need the money that comes from employment, wed spend most of our time on things we really enjoy: being with loved ones, hobbies, nature, and taking care of ourselves. We need to think of our careers a little more transactionally than the business books at airports press us to. Exactly how much money do I need at each phase of my life, and how do I plot a career that gets me that while eating up as little of my precious time as possible? This means thinking hard about the lifecycle of your job. Investing lots of time in your twenties can make sense because youre not as squeezed by home responsibilities, and it can buy you a better time-to-money conversion rate from your job later in life. But you want to make sure youre in a field where you are working toward the ability to take your foot off the gas at some pointlike during the squeezeand use more of that time making utility directly. Otherwise, the prize for the pie-eating contest is more pie! Your investment in your career should be proportional to the role money plays in maximizing your utility. Everything else is just chasing success at the expense of true happiness. 4. You can work like a girl and get paid There is no evidence that male traits are actually more productive, and there certainly isnt any evidence that women will be rewarded for mimicking them. When I got to Wharton, a male colleague told me that students respect you more when you are tough, saying that I needed to show them who was boss right from the start. So, I marked them tardy if they were a minute late, and guess what? They hated it coming from me. A female professor told me that shed found her students expected her to be really nice, and she had to fulfill their social expectations to receive good reviews. Research backs up this anecdote: Women are often penalized for failing to exhibit expected traits like niceness and community-mindedness. I want women to view their gendered traits as superpowers. While its also true that the evidence shows that men are, on average, more competitive, more risk-loving, tougher negotiators, and greater self-promoters, it does not say that those things lead to more productivity or higher profits. In a study on competitiveness, men were overcompetitive. Subjects performed a task and had to decide whether they wanted to receive payment for their efforts or participate in a tournament, where they would only be paid if they scored the highest. Of the worst-performing men (the men certain to lose the tournament), 60% still chose to enter rather than take the guaranteed payoff. In my own research on negotiation, I found that male-male pairs were more than twice as likely to fail to reach an agreement and therefore walk away from a negotiation with nothing. I want women to view their gendered traits as superpowers, and find workplaces where they can get ahead by being themselvesnot by pretending to be a man and getting punished for it anyway. 5. We must radically prioritize what contributes to our happiness When the deck is stacked against us, we cant keep trying to play fairmeeting everyone elses needs, and never our own. We have to become ruthless in aligning our time with what gives us utility. Take these three steps: Renegotiate how time and money are allocated in your household. Throw out your houseplants and make other hard choices. Pay yourself first with leisure time. First, to renegotiate the deal in your household, I want you and your partner to track your time. Often, men think theyre doing about half the household work, but thats only because they do half of the things they know about. While theyre doing half the school drop-offs, youre the one making sure there are clothes in the right size, lunches packed, after-school care, and playdates are scheduledhalf of which you multitask during work. If you track your time, you might realize theres a lot more inequality than you think, and you can start reallocating. Once you reallocate the households joint time budget, if theres still inequality in work and leisure time, see if reallocating money can help. Not outsourcing a task is hiring yourself to do it. We rarely do this with male-coded tasks (like car repair and plumbing), but somehow, for female-coded tasks, we forget that doing something in-house has an opportunity cost of where else you could invest that time. If youre a lawyer who bills at a certain rate, or a nurse who could pick up an extra shift, can you really afford that much of your own time for laundry? We have to become ruthless in aligning our time with what gives us utility. Second, throw out your houseplants is my pithy phrase for decluttering your time of anything thats an obligation rather than a calling. For me, it was wilting houseplants that I didnt have time to care for and made me feel like a failure. For you, it might be volunteering at your kids school, making homemade baby food, or planning the office retreat. Understanding how were being squeezed from all sides gives you the freedom to say, Nope, this doesnt add up for me right now. Importantly, you can always say yes later when youre in a different, and easier, chapter of your life. Lastly, pay yourself first with leisure time. We do get some time to ourselves, but often its just little crumbles of time left over at the end of the day. By then, were so depleted we end up just zoning out on our phones. If we block out time for the things that bring us the most joy and meaning, everything else can claim the scraps! Its like how we can suddenly get a project done in an hour before the deadlinethings expand to fill the available space in our calendars. Block your leisure time like an important meeting, and let yourself be your own top priority. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
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