Shoppers couldn’t get enough toys and games during the pandemic. Now, they are finding other ways to spend their time, and that is spelling trouble for toy makers and sellers.

Sales of toys have slumped so far this year, down 8% through September compared with the same period last year, according to market-research firm Circana, and appeared poised to be lacklustre this holiday season. Imports of toys and games have fallen sharply this year and sales at toy stores, department stores and other gift sellers declined in October, leading a broader pullback.

A retrenchment on the most fun-to-give gifts sends a signal that Americans are starting to ease their spending more broadly as pandemic savings dwindle, the labor market softens and shoppers worry about global events and still-elevated inflation. Easing consumer spending would cool overall growth, because it accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity.

This holiday season is off to a slow start for Wildlings Toy Boutique in Phoenix, which sells classic toys dollhouses and wooden cars and accessories. The store has been trying to drum up customer interest with experiences, including Santa visits and family photo shoots in front of a Christmas-tree backdrop outside the store.

“I think people are reluctant to spend as much and to spend as early,” said owner Jennifer Mawcinitt, who expects people to come in looking for deals on Black Friday.

Larger retailers are seeing similar trends.

Customers are “showing ongoing discretion and making trade-offs to be able to afford the things they want, given the sustained high cost of the things they need,” Walmart Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey told analysts last week.

Experiences valued over things

Early in the pandemic, when many were unable to travel and dine out, Americans shifted their spending toward goods, including toys, games and electronics. That has reversed.

Spending on services has grown roughly double the pace of goods for most of this year as consumers caught up on experiences such as concerts and trips to Europe.

Fewer board games and puzzles are coming off toy store shelves because “people are going outside,” said Katherine Nguyen, owner of Building Blocks Toy Stores, which has three locations in Chicago.

Nguyen is seeing an exception: Shoppers can’t wait to get their hands on toys they can squeeze, such as the Bitzee digital pet and Squishable plush toys. “I don’t have a store big enough to sell” all the stuffed animals now in demand, Nguyen said. She added that those toys are popular in part because they are geared toward social and emotional self-care as children navigate post pandemic life.

Hannah Sweet, a retired care manager in Tiburon, Calif., said she is more cautious about spending this holiday season than in previous years, pointing to concerns about an economic downturn. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal last month put the probability of a recession in the next year at essentially a coin flip.

“I am prioritising gifts to children and grandchildren,” said Sweet, 81 years old. Still, she recently took a trip to Germany and next year plans to go on a river cruise in Europe with family. “It’s important to travel while I can,” Sweet said.

The National Retail Federation, a trade group, expects November and December holiday spending to rise 3% to 4% this year from last, or hold about flat when factoring in inflation. That would be slower than a 5.4% increase in 2022 and a 13% rise in 2021.

Expecting potentially weaker demand, retailers and other sellers ordered fewer toys and other popular gifts from overseas. U.S. imports of toys, games and sporting goods dropped 21.5% in the nine months through September, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the Commerce Department. Bicycle imports fell more than 40%; smartphones declined 16%.

Toy companies struggled to clear out bloated inventories in 2022 after supply-chain snags left retailers with extra stock. Barbie maker Mattel warned that rising prices across the economy and high borrowing costs would likely continue to dent demand for toys this holiday season. Chief Executive Ynon Kreiz said last month that overall industry sales would fall by a mid-single-digit percentage for the full year.

Hasbro, the maker of Monopoly, Play-Doh and Transformers action figures, reported a 10% drop in revenue in the third quarter and cut its full-year guidance because of weak demand.

“We have a cautious outlook on the holiday,” Hasbro Chief Executive Chris Cocks said on a call with analysts. “And I think anyone who says they know how the holiday is going to go, they must have a crystal ball because this has been a tough one to predict.”

Hasbro expects consumers to wait longer to make their purchases and to look for more deals. Some deals are already emerging. Toy prices fell nearly 4% in October from a year earlier, the Labor Department said.

Consumer concerns emerge

Shoppers are facing a number of headwinds that threaten to curtail holiday cheer this year.

Hiring slowed sharply in October and the unemployment rate has risen this year. Paying down credit-card bills is more difficult with interest rates at two-decade highs, and student-loan payments resumed for millions of borrowers. Consumer sentiment in November fell to the lowest level in six months, the University of Michigan said Wednesday.

Americans’ downer attitudes on the economy might not transfer to slashed spending. Many economists saw signs that elevated interest rates would cause consumers to ease up earlier this year. Instead, they spent lavishly, causing economic growth to accelerate.

“Overall, the consumer has been very resilient: that’s why we’re not in a recession,” said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester.

Nguyen, the owner of Building Blocks, remains optimistic about this holiday season. “People don’t cut out their children,” she said. “Even if they have job insecurity, or worry about food costs,” they still buy gifts for their children, she added.

—Anthony DeBarros contributed to this article.

There is an urban myth that says online shoppers who doggedly search for certain items on the web get tagged by algorithms that then cause them to see higher prices than others shopping for those same items.

The solution for many people: They choose private mode on their web browsers, believing that cloaking their identity can help them get better prices.

But while such “private” settings as Google Chrome’s Incognito mode or Apple’s Safari private browsing mode do offer some benefits, getting a better price isn’t one of them.

“All these private modes do for shoppers is basically erase your search history from the device you’re on and prevent the browser from using your cookies to see your browsing activity across different sites,” says Benjamin Barrontine, vice president of executive services at 360 Privacy, a company that specialises in protecting clients’ digital identity. This is a great feature if you share a laptop with your children and you want to hide the presents you’re purchasing for them, but companies’ pricing is typically based on a number of factors—timing, location, how much an item in that category’s company paid to rise to the top of your search results—that don’t have to do with you personally or how often you search for a product.

A Google spokesperson confirms that cookies, or information stored on your device, are remembered in the current Chrome browsing session while in Incognito mode but then deleted immediately after closing out the session. If you return in Incognito mode to make the purchase, the websites will see you as a new user and won’t remember what you left in your cart. You essentially have to start your search anew, but with the benefit of blocking anyone who shares that device from seeing what you were researching.

Ultimately, experts say, private modes give shoppers a false sense of anonymity and a feeling that they are gaming the system, when all they are doing is hiding past searches. “You should know that your internet-service provider and even your network administrator at work, if you’re searching on a work device or network, may still see what you’re searching,” says Barrontine. “Private mode is not so private, after all.”

In fact, the big tech companies most likely know with near certainty who it is that is doing this supposedly secret searching, even in private mode.

“When you go on to Amazon.com in private mode and search for a bathrobe, even if you’re not logged into the site, Amazon is 99.9% sure of who you are because of the digital fingerprint they’ve developed for you over time,” says Ken Carnesi, chief executive and co-founder of DNSFilter, a software firm that protects companies from attacks at the domain name system level. That’s because Amazon would still know how you arrived at its site based on the link you clicked, your IP address, your ZIP Code, many of your preference settings and loads of other device-specific attributes. A company spokesman declined to comment.

The tech firms may not know that it is specifically you scouring their sites, but they’d know the search came from your home, which operating system you’re using, which language is your default and other details that point to you.

“That’s why, even when you’re not in private mode later on, if you didn’t close out that private window, you may still see bathrobes being pitched to you,” Carnesi says. “All the tracking is likely still passed through to the company who paid for the ad you clicked on.”

Contrary to popular belief, pricing for highly fluctuating, big-ticket items isn’t impacted by private searches, says Kevin Williams, an associate professor at the Yale School of Management who recently published a paper looking at airlines’ methods of dynamic pricing. Williams says in the case of plane tickets, “Airline pricing doesn’t take into account any of your personal information except location,” as in the country of origin. Using a virtual private network (VPN) can obfuscate your device’s physical location, and may turn up a better fare, but might require some trial and error, Williams says.

There are some additional benefits for shoppers to using private mode, beyond hiding your searches from prying eyes. The search bar won’t auto-fill with prior searches, so you can start anew every time you open a new private window and not fall down an old rabbit hole. You can keep your searches private on a public device or borrowed computer. And you can use a credit card that will later be wiped so your children won’t have access to funds without permission.

For true privacy, consider shopping through a search engine like Brave.com, which doesn’t ever track your searches or your clicks. “Unlike with other search engines, you and your data are not the product here,” Carnesi says. And your partner will never know about that bathrobe you forgot to actually purchase.

With offshore wind projects bleeding cash, governments will have to pay more to hit their clean-energy targets. Recent auctions show just how much more.

Higher prices for steel, labor and debt financing have raised the cost of developing a wind farm by almost 40% since 2019. It is a big problem for developers like Danish energy company Ørsted, which signed power supply agreements a few years ago at prices that no longer cover today’s costs.

Developers’ struggles are having a knock-on effect on the turbine makers that supply them, including Vestas, GE and Siemens Energy. The latter’s wind unit, Siemens Gamesa, lost €4.3 billion in the company’s latest fiscal year, equivalent to $4.7 billion at current exchange rates—although its issues are mainly with faulty onshore turbines rather than offshore ones.

Germany last week stepped in with a multi-billion-euro state-backed guarantee for Siemens Energy, which told investors at a capital markets day on Tuesday that its wind division won’t make a profit until after 2026. GE says its offshore wind business will lose $1 billion this year, and the same again in 2024.

The industry’s deepest challenges are in the U.S., a market that was meant to be the next growth frontier following the Biden administration’s pledge to install 30 gigawatts of offshore capacity by 2030. Instead, developers are taking multibillion-dollar impairments on U.S. projects, or backing out entirely. According to BloombergNEF, of the 21.6 gigawatts of offshore wind power awarded or signed so far in the U.S., a quarter has been canceled and almost another third is at risk.

Governments are now responding by topping up the prices at which they auction off licenses. Britain was forced to raise its guaranteed price for offshore wind power by 66% after a September auction didn’t attract a single bid. The average price in New York’s latest offshore wind auction in October was a fifth higher than previous rounds, according to BloombergNEF, and the bill could rise further as new contracts include inflation protection that will shield developers from future cost pressures.

Paying higher, more flexible prices for fresh contracts might still end up being a cheaper solution for New York than renegotiating old ones. Developers including BP and Equinor asked for increases of 49% on average over what was agreed in their original power supply contracts. They may pull out after getting a no from the state.

Governments and companies had become used to the cost of renewable energy heading only one way. The global average levelized cost of electricity generated by offshore wind—a measure of the minimum price necessary to cover the lifetime costs of a project—has plunged by 66% since 2009, according to BloombergNEF data.

After years of becoming more competitive as a source of power, offshore wind is beginning to look expensive in some markets compared with fossil-fuel alternatives. Globally, new offshore wind projects still work out cheaper than natural gas ones and are level with coal. But offshore wind looks costly in the U.S., partly because the supply chain is so immature and will need heavy investment for several years.

The new reality makes it harder for governments to meet their net-zero targets while also keeping power costs low for the public. But densely populated areas like New York may not have much choice but to exploit offshore wind. Clean alternatives such as land-based wind and solar farms are tough to roll out where space is at a premium.

The European Union is also aware that if governments don’t do more to support local companies like Siemens Energy, Chinese turbine manufacturers that enjoy generous subsidies from Beijing will be only too happy to step in. This would help the EU stay on track with an ambitious plan to increase its offshore wind capacity sevenfold by 2030, but at the expense of the bloc’s energy independence.

Harnessing the winds out at sea is still a key part of countries’ plans to cut their carbon emissions and boost energy security. But governments can no longer pretend that these political objectives can come cheap.

The chief executive of Binance, the largest global cryptocurrency exchange, plans to step down and plead guilty to violating criminal U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements, in a deal that may preserve the company’s ability to continue operating, according to people familiar with the matter.

Changpeng Zhao is scheduled to appear in Seattle federal court Tuesday afternoon and enter his plea, according to court records unsealed Tuesday. Prosecutors also unsealed a document charging Binance, which Zhao owns, with anti-money-laundering and sanctions crimes. Binance will also plead guilty and agree to pay fines totaling $4.3 billion, which includes amounts to settle civil allegations made by regulators, the people said.

Zhao has agreed to pay a criminal fine of $50 million, although that amount may be reduced based on separate civil penalties he has agreed to pay, court records show.

The deal would end long-running investigations of Binance. Zhao founded the firm in 2017 and turned it into the most important hub of the global crypto market. The criminal probe, in particular, has shadowed the company even as its market share initially grew after the collapse last year of FTX, one of its main offshore competitors.

Executives have recently fled Binance, and the exchange has laid off a chunk of its employees this year as the company struggled to come to terms with the U.S. probes.

The deal would allow Zhao to retain his majority ownership of Binance, although he won’t be able to have an executive role at the company. He is eligible to return to working at the company three years after a court-imposed compliance monitor is appointed, court records show. He would face sentencing at a later date.

The outcome resembles an earlier case that prosecutors brought against the executives of BitMEX, an exchange for trading crypto derivatives that was based in the Seychelles. Its former CEO, Arthur Hayes, pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering law and was later sentenced to two years probation, avoiding a possible prison term of six to 12 months.

Striking a deal between the Justice Department and Binance had been elusive for months, the people said. Zhao recently hired a new lead attorney, William A. Burck of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, to represent him before the Justice Department. Gibson Dunn & Crutcher has represented Binance.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

The deal to be announced on Tuesday doesn’t include a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which sued Binance and Zhao in June and alleged it violated U.S. investor-protection laws, the people said. Major crypto exchanges such as Binance have decided to litigate with the SEC, believing they can show that cryptocurrencies don’t qualify as the kinds of investments overseen by the SEC.

The Justice Department’s investigation looked at Binance’s program to detect and prevent money laundering and whether it allowed individuals in sanctioned countries, such as Iran and Russia, to trade with Americans on the exchange, the Journal previously reported.

A separate agreement would resolve a civil lawsuit filed against Binance and Zhao earlier this year by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, one of the U.S. regulators that has tried to police the freewheeling global market, the people said. The $4.3 billion that Binance would pay includes amounts to address the CFTC’s claims and those leveled by agencies of the Treasury Department.

The CFTC claimed that Binance for years didn’t have a program to prevent and detect terrorist financing and money laundering. It also said Binance gave Americans access to derivatives such as futures or swaps that can only be traded in the U.S. if they are offered on regulated platforms. Binance never registered with U.S. regulators, making its risky leveraged products off-limits to American traders, the CFTC said.

A CFTC spokesman declined to comment.

Zhao resides in the United Arab Emirates and had curtailed his travel this year. The United Arab Emirates doesn’t have a mutual extradition treaty with the U.S., although last year the countries signed a treaty that enhances law-enforcement evidence sharing.

The U.A.E. remained welcoming to crypto even as countries such as China and the U.S. have cracked down on the unregulated industry. Zhao’s status was a sticking point in negotiations between the government and Binance for months, according to people familiar with the talks.

—Caitlin Ostroff contributed to this article.

EA YONG, Vietnam—In the verdant highlands of central Vietnam, warehouses the size of airplane hangars dominate small farming towns, bristling with mounds of tropical fruit. The bounty is destined for a colossal market: China.

Farmers are felling coffee trees traditionally grown in this cool hilly region to plant spiky durians, pungent fruits that have become wildly popular in China. They are reaping the windfall to buy new irrigation systems, pay off loans and build shiny marble facades to their homes.

“We locals aren’t just doing well, we can even be considered rich,” said Pham Van Trung, 54, as he ate a late lunch of pork and rice wine. Trung made $81,000 this year selling durian, and said the region was swarming with Chinese buyers.

China’s appetite for foreign produce has grown in recent decades along with the wealth of its consumers. The amount of food the world’s second most populous nation imports has risen to over $200 billion a year—more than any other country—from about $15 billion two decades ago, according to the World Trade Organization. Avocado farmers in Kenya, shrimp cultivators in India, soy producers in Russia and banana growers in Cambodia are all cashing in.

While economic growth in China has slowed recently and its population is shrinking, demand for nutrient-rich foods such as beef and tropical fruit has remained high.

Last year, the Chinese noshed through more than 800,000 metric tons of imported durian and nearly six million metric tons of imported meat—both world-leading totals. It bought 90 million metric tons of soybeans from overseas last year, accounting for roughly 60% of global trade, for use in making tofu and to feed the country’s hundreds of millions of pigs.

Feeding China’s massive middle class presents a historic opportunity for countries seeking to boost the incomes of people in poor, rural areas. But it also poses a quandary: how to tap in to its huge market without becoming dependent on a trade partner that can be fickle.

In recent years, China has restricted imports of Norwegian salmon, Taiwanese pineapples, Philippines bananas and Australian lobsters. It usually cites contamination, pests or issues with quality—but Beijing’s curbs have also often coincided with political disputes.

China slapped hefty antidumping duties on Australian wine exports in 2020 after Australia called for an independent probe into the origins of Covid-19. In 2012, China halted purchases from banana growers in the Philippines, saying mealybugs had been discovered in shipments, after a flare-up between the countries in the South China Sea.

“With the size of the Chinese economy, it can always use trade to punish an exporter,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Selling to China is “an opportunity, and it is a risk,” she said.

The risk is higher because when the chance to export to China’s massive market opens up, often entire agricultural belts go all in. This can lead to what Sun calls “singularification,” or the concentration of a local economy around one product, making it vulnerable to disruption.

That is what appears to be happening in Vietnam’s central highlands. The region is famed for its Robusta coffee, which is sold around the world. But last year, Beijing opened the gates to large-scale imports of Vietnamese durian—and farmers here began uprooting their coffee crops. Traders flocked to snap up the produce, causing local prices to more than double this year.

Be Duc Huynh, a 26-year-old farmer who got rid of his entire coffee crop, said he makes about five times as much from a hectare of durian as he earned from coffee. He harvested four tons of durian this year, up from one ton last year—all of it destined for China.

China buys around 90% of durian exports from Vietnam, which also sells much of its dragon fruit, bananas, mangoes and jackfruit to its giant neighbour. In recent months around 60% of Vietnam’s fruit and vegetable exports have gone to China, up from one-third a decade ago, according to official figures compiled by data provider CEIC.

During the autumn harvest time, the village air carried the sharp smell of the fruit. Families stacked mounds of durian in front of their homes to entice traders, who thwacked the durian shells with knife handles to test for quality. Hard means it is too young; soft means it is ripe and can sell for a higher price.

On a recent afternoon, durian trader Nguyen Thai Huyen dug into the flesh with her painted-pink fingernails, tasting bits of durian to determine their ripeness. Huyen posts snappy videos on TikTok of her visits to plantations and the mountains of durian she has on offer.

“A few years ago people considered durian a crop to reduce poverty,” she said. “Now it is the million-dollar crop.”

She has tried selling to Japan, but said buyers there only take small amounts. She isn’t especially worried about being too reliant on China, though. She says durian’s popularity has room to grow in the country, where many are still unfamiliar with the fruit.

Vietnam’s government is less certain. Earlier this year the agriculture ministry issued a warning about what state media called reckless durian cultivation, saying many farmers were abandoning traditional crops such as coffee and rice and planting durian in areas unsuited to it. Agriculture experts cited in state media have encouraged farmers to develop alternative markets to China and try to sell more of their produce locally.

Traders say that is easier said than done. The fruit has few takers outside of the region, and recent high prices put durian out of reach of many local Vietnamese.

Still, farmers say they want to be careful. In September, some fruit exports including durian were halted after Beijing complained about mealybugs and other pests. It reminded farmers of a major disruption in January 2022 when truckloads of Vietnamese produce rotted after China sealed off its southern border to contain the spread of Covid-19.

H’Meng, a farmer who goes by one name, has planted hundreds of durian trees in recent years. Now, she said, she is planning to grow more coffee. The prices are more stable, she said, because the market for coffee isn’t focused on one nation.

“I’m worried about becoming too dependent on China,” she said.

People are often convinced their lives would improve if only they could climb a few rungs on the income ladder.

They are right, to an extent. Many studies have found a link between income and happiness, both in terms of day-to-day mood and longer-term life satisfaction. Having more money would help many people afford necessities, and on average, richer people report being happier.

Exactly how much more money do we think we need to be happy? A new survey from the financial-services company Empower put the question to about 2,000 people.

In the survey, most people said it would take a pretty significant pay bump to deliver contentment. The respondents, who had a median salary of $65,000 a year, said a median of $95,000 would make them happy and less stressed. The highest earners, with a median income of $250,000, gave a median response of $350,000.

Employers are planning on an average pay increase of 3.9% in 2024 for nonunion employees, according to a survey from the consulting firm Mercer. In the Empower survey, Americans said that to be happy, they would need almost a 50% raise.

Just how much happier a 3.9% or 50% raise would make any given person is hard to determine, researchers said.

One study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year, found that people who randomly received $10,000 tended to get a happiness boost that lasted at least six months. (The $2 million given out in the study was provided by a wealthy couple, who the researchers estimated generated 225 times more happiness than if they had kept the money themselves.)

Another, from the Review of Economic Studies in 2020, looked at lottery winners in Sweden whose prizes were mostly between $100,000 and $500,000. They reported higher levels of satisfaction with their lives more than a decade after their windfall, compared with lottery players who won no prize or a small one.

The magnitude of a raise’s effect, though, might not be life-changing.

“The impact of money on happiness isn’t as large as people typically assume,” said Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of a book on money and happiness. “Happiness is determined by so many different factors that changing any one thing, it’s hard to have a huge impact.”

Happiness for sale

About seven in 10 respondents in the Empower survey said they strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement: “Having more money would solve most of my problems.” Similar proportions of people in each income bracket felt that way, including those with salaries of $200,000 or more.

Dunn said that many people might be happier if they focus on the best ways to use the money they have, rather than on getting more of it.

“That’s something that we know makes a difference and that people have control over in the immediate term,” she said.

Dunn said many people over emphasise money, relative to other variables, as a path to contentment. Her research indicates that those who give priority to time over money tend to be happier in life.

A little bit more

And as soon as someone does reach a new pay tier, they often start focusing on the next one as their target recalibrates.

“They might imagine that once they get the higher salary, then that’ll be enough,” said Matt Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who studies the causes of happiness. “In reality, once they get there, they’ll probably want a little bit more.”

Even very wealthy people think like this. A 2018 study asked millionaires to rate their happiness on a scale from one to 10 and, if they didn’t say 10, predict how much money they would need to move one point higher. Slightly over half of those with a net worth of $10 million or more said their wealth would need to increase by at least 50%.

“It’s part of what makes humans amazing,” said Killingsworth of the impulse to continue advancing. “But it also means we rarely look at an aspect of our life and say, ‘That’s absolutely perfect.’”