Signs of improvement in consumer spending will be short lived if the latest measures of spending confidence tell us something about the outlook. Confidence to spend over the next 90 days was flat in June among Millennials and Gen X households….
What is the best way to understand the impact of confidence on spending? Of late, the only thing that’s clear is that the relationship is far from direct. In May, the post-election runup in consumers’ spending confidence—which has been led by…
Spending confidence among Boomers surpassed Millennials in April, defying a longstanding pattern of behavior in which younger people are always more optimistic than older people. A clear benefit to store-based retailers—which had previously benefited from Boomers’ spending—remains elusive. Although topline retail…
Surging spending confidence among Boomers makes them a renewed target—albeit a challenging one—for marketers in the short term as spending plans bottom out among Millennials and plateau among Gen X shoppers. That’s the takeaway from data through March from the Spending…
The consumer outlook in early 2017 continues to be held back by slipping confidence among Millennials—which is offsetting surging confidence to spend among Boomers. Further restraining the outlook in February was a slight slip in confidence among Gen X, which has…
Spending confidence among Millennials continued to slide in January in stark contrast to surging post-election confidence among Boomers. As a result, consumer spending in 2017 is likely to be still more uneven among consumable and discretionary categories than last year—even as…
Boomers again pushed spending confidence higher in December, but Millennials may hold back the outlook for consumer spending through the remainder of the holidays and to start the New Year. The uptick in confidence follows a big jump in the immediate…