With the holiday shopping season approaching, people want to buy presents.  An important part of buying things is paying for them, however, and so searches for credit cards are increasing.

This isn’t a terribly good sign for retailers and the economy, since, instead of having cash to throw across the counter, people are looking for Visa and MasterCard to fill the gap.  Heather Hopkins reports that, “[f]urther emphasizing the financial woes, among the top non-branded searches for credit cards are ‘credit cards for bad credit’ and ‘bad credit credit cards’.”

Of course, not everyone is going to be hurt by this trend; credit card companies will, after weeding out certain applicants, presumably profit off the rest.  “Capital One is the brand to watch - with the share of US Internet searches for ‘capital one credit card’ almost doubling (+96%) year on year last week,” notes Hopkins.

Still, it looks like the rest of this month and December could be a little financially shaky.  Perhaps - and I’m only half-joking here - parents could both save some money and avoid recall worries by getting into the toy-building business themselves.

Tags: Credit Cards, Holidays, Hitwise