“South Korean Thanksgiving”: Tracking Chuseok credit-card spending sprees

Chuseok is a three-day autumn harvest festival. Like Thanksgiving for Americans, South Koreans tend to use this time off to go shopping and spend on family gatherings; retailers often offer special promotions.

This makes the Chuseok season important for assessing overall consumer sentiment. This year, high-frequency credit-card data shows that spending surpassed last year's holiday peak -- a bullish early sign for this month's official retail sales data: it's not released until Nov. 28.

Our weekly spending statistics are sourced from Shinhan, South Korea's largest credit-card company. (We use a four-month moving average to smooth the data.) They are released with a much shorter time lag.

As our table shows, Chuseok was observed later than usual this year -- hence why October will be the key month to watch for retail sales.

A better-than-expected Chuseok shopping spree would be a positive sign given that persistent inflation had been eroding real consumer spending in South Korea for years, as our subsequent charts show. September saw a notable uptick in the CPI.

We conclude with a heat map looking at the relative health of various retail subsectors. Most categories are doing better than they were in the doldrums of early 2025, though there is more yellow and orange than green lately. The notable outperformer is car sales -- a category we usually exclude when analyzing headline consumer spending.

• The discrepancies in timing each year are due to the use of a lunisolar calendar.
• The Chuseok break typically lasts for a minimum of 3 days. However, if Chuseok coincides with a Sunday, replacement days off may be given. In conjunction with other holidays, sometimes the holiday can stretch to seven days -- as occurred this year.
• The relatively weak figures for 2024 were likely due to the political crisis that was gathering pace at the time.

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