This year, self-gifting has hit an all-time high. Shoppers are rushing to sales racks and frantically loading up on everything from tablets to trendy sneakers for that very special someone known as Me.

According to the Wall Street Journal, market research company NPD has discovered that the trend is a prime driver of holiday shopping growth this year. Before the recession, the firm found that around 12 percent of shoppers said they’d purchased items for themselves during the holidays. Last year the figure was up to 19 percent for surveys that went out before Christmas. And the post-Christmas surveys showed that 26 percent of respondents had made holiday purchases for Numero Uno. This year, the figure is already up to a whopping 32 percent.

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Even the savviest shoppers can be tricked into buying things they don’t want or need. There’s no need to feel foolish; the retail industry spends an inordinate amount of time and money figuring out the science (yes, it is a science) of how to sell the most stuff. But it is a good idea for consumers to know what they're going into, especially around the holiday season, when stress levels are running high and stores are packed with shoppers spending money left and right.

Though far from a comprehensive list, here are six tactics retailers use to get you to part with your hard-earned dough.

1. Holiday ploys: The scents and sounds of the season.

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There’s a reason for that.

Savvy retailers use all kinds of sensory information to convey their brand, welcome you in, and put you in a frame of mind that they hope will lead to more sales. Their displays are arranged just so. Their wall colors are carefully chosen. The music burbling through their speakers hits all the right notes.

That fresh-baked-cookie smell is part of the package. The use of scents to lure customers in is the latest frontier in sensory marketing, with an entire industry supplying retailers with just the right aroma for their business.

The problem is, the science isn’t always there.

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I spent some time at one of these megastores last week, and what I really noticed were the kids. The best way to understand Christmas in modern America is to watch how children react to the intense marketing directed their way. Kids are the purest representation of our values, because they haven't yet learned to disguise their desires and feelings. They don't yet know they are being marketed to, they want what they want, and they are going to bug their parents to get it. In fact, piggybacking on innocence is a standard tactic in children's marketing, known as accentuating "the nag factor." But they also want to be adults, to help, to be taken seriously.

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The increasing importance of internet retail appears to be coming at the expense of traditional brick and mortar stores which saw Black Friday sales drop slightly, to $11.2 billion.

The online shopping surge arrived even before tomorrow’s “cyber Monday” event when consumers can supposedly access numerous online bargains. However, the decision by online retail behemoth Amazon to offer comparable bargains throughout last week may cut into cyber Monday grosses and relevance.

In recent years, Black Friday sales have created near riots and even fatalities as shoppers crushed into big box stores. This year the frenzy was relatively subdued though there was a hectic scene outside a Victoria’s Secret in Kansas City, Mo.

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The release noted that "the same number of associates missed their scheduled shift as last year," but hundreds of protests in 46 states beginning Thursday evening have drawn attention to the retailer's poor labor practices while according to The Nation, workers struck at stores in Dallas, Kenosha, Wis., San Leandro, Calif., and Clovis, N.M. At least one worker went out on strike at stores in Ocean City, Md., Orlando and Baton Rouge. Rep.-elect Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) joined a Walmart worker as she walked off her job in St. Cloud.

Walmart stores rang up almost 10 million transactions from the time doors opened for Black Friday shoppers at 8 p.m. Thursday until midnight. Meanwhile the following strikes and protest actions have been reported:

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Police Sgt. Rob Carey tells the San Antonio Express-News a man rushed into the store when it opened Thursday night to get to the front of a line, started arguing with people and tried cutting in front of them.

One man who got punched pulled a gun and that scattered shoppers, including the impatient line-cutter who took cover behind a refrigerator. Then he fled.

Carey says the man with the gun had a permit to carry the weapon and isn't being charged with a crime.

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The Black Friday walkout is being organized by the Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart (OUR Walmart), a group of Wal-Mart employees formed last year that works closely with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, or UFCW. OUR Walmart, which organized walkouts in October, is pushing for better working conditions, benefits, and an end to alleged retaliation by management.

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Consider the example of the Kelley family in Fort Myers, Fla., so determined to sacrifice nothing of their quality of life while in quest for the perfect deal that they showed up in front of the local Best Buy's doors on Monday, equipped with a dinner table.

This is what we call not messing around:

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What would she do? I asked. Would the family wait dinner for her?

"No," she said. "I'll eat leftovers when I get home from work. It's what I did last year, too."

And I was so angry on her behalf. But she needed her job, and she couldn't say no without the risk of being fired, and so a mother who should have been spending time with her child on our most family-friendly day was shipping off to help sell cheap flat-screen televisions to the masses.

How did this happen?

Thanksgiving used to be a time to be grateful for what you already had. Back when George Washington declared it a national holiday, almost all work came to a stop. I’m still moved by Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover, depicting a family's simple joy. The painting was called “Freedom From Want.”

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Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

There are many reasons for the difference – including globalization and technological changes that have shrunk employment in American manufacturing while enlarging it in sectors involving personal services, such as retail.

But one reason, closely related to this seismic shift, is the decline of labor unions in the United States. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today fewer than 7 percent do. As a result, the typical American worker no longer has the bargaining clout to get a sizeable share of corporate profits.

At the peak of its power and influence in the 1950s, the United Auto Workers could claim a significant portion of GM’s earnings for its members.

Walmart’s employees, by contrast, have no union to represent them. So they’ve had no means of getting much of the corporation’s earnings.

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"Black Friday," wrote Eidelson, "workers have pledged -- barring concessions from the company -- will bring their biggest disruptions yet." Walmart employees across the country have a host of grievances including unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, sexual harassment, excessive hours, forced labor and low pay. Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC flagged a leaked internal document (first obtained by HuffPo) that revealed that base pay  at Walmart's Sam's Place stores can be as low as $8 an hour (or $16,000 per year), with wage increases in increments as low as 20 or 40 cents per hour. To put this in context, Gawker recently highlighted a Demos study that says that raising the salary of all full-time workers at large retailers to $25,000 per year would lift more than 700,000 people out of poverty, at a cost of only a 1 percent price increase for customers.

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But before attempting to answer that question in any detail, let's review the video from a Wal-Mart near Little Rock, Ark., in which shoppers exploded into what can only be called a riot as they shoved each other out of the way in a frenzy to grab $2 waffle-makers.

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What does it all mean?

I stared into this heart of retail panic darkness, and the more I clicked and pondered, the more confused -- (mind-boggled? fascinated? flabbergasted?) -- I became. The Crazy Target Lady, so proud of her OCD -- obsessive Christmas disorder -- is not funny. She's scary. She's why people trample each other to death. She is wrong.

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