Consumers Are Screwed No Matter What They Do
Buy stuff? In this economy? You're an indulgent hedonist. Don't buy stuff? In this economy? You're a dirty socialist.
The sun is out and for a few minutes Ottawa, and much of Canada, is enjoying nice weather. Who knows how long that’ll last. In a bid to make the most of it, I’m writing a short piece this week on that article. Yeah, the one that caught so much, let’s say, attention on social media this week.
On April 7, Business Insider ran a piece with the headline “Millennials and Gen Z's trendy new splurge: groceries.” As a header, it does exactly what so many headlines are designed to do now: grab attention, preferably out of context.
People flipped out over the piece, sharing it, and clicking on it. Maybe a few read it. More than would have with a different headline, that’s for sure. For the metrics, and advertisers, that’s a job done. It’s cynical. It’s silly. It’s the business. I don’t love it. But there’s something worth talking about here beyond the headline. A few things.
The piece covers a report by McKinsey & Company on US consumer sentiment (which, as it happens, is looking up). Looking at recent spending data, the authors write “Groceries were the new biggest splurge category, unseating restaurants.” A splurge in this case is constructed as an intent to treat oneself, to spend beyond normal, beyond necessity. The report notes
rather than splurging on dining out, consumers said they intended to splurge on food at home more than they did at the end of 2023. This change was most evident among Gen Zers and millennials.
That means people are spending more than they otherwise would on groceries — not staples, the basics, but items they self-identify as extra. We can get into what counts as what, to what extent, if any food, should be commodified, etc., etc., but the immediate point here is that the headline is at best incomplete and simply begs for, and may indeed be designed for, hate reads and shares.
There’s another problem.
There’s a difference between affordable milk and affordable Red Bull, which brings me to a broader point. The free market is famous for harbouring well-paid people whose job it is to make us want Red Bull and other ‘splurge’ items — the sorts of things people are spending more on right now. They work on milk and flour desire-construction, too, but we don’t really consider those items “splurges.”
Advertising and brand development is big business. It has been for the better part of a century. These operations are slick and sophisticated, increasingly driven by data and consumer research that yields tactics and strategies for manipulating and exploiting people. And yet we pretend as if these things don’t exist when it comes to dragging people for their purchasing decisions.
Pro-market folks chastise consumers, particularly young folks, for “irresponsible” spending and splurging. That is, free market defenders at once support a system designed to induce splurge demand and decry individuals for doing exactly what they’re being asked to do. The market, in this case, is doing what these folks expect it to do — create and market products, increase sales, profit, sell-out, bro-down.
As I said on Twitter, the Business Insider piece doesn’t really get into the fact that “splurge” spending on what it calls “flashy food and beverages” is in fact an effect of a market that is specifically designed to get people to spend money as much money as possible on this stuff. Since people love to lecture and judge others for their behaviour, we end up in a situation where people are lured into buying the very things they are then criticized for buying. It’s silly. And if people didn’t buy things, they’d be dragged for letting down the economy and all of us. You can’t win!
Deeply embedded in these criticisms is a drive for austerity for others, a judgment that folks over there are indulgent and soft (while you are hard-working and disciplined, naturally). We are judgmental creatures and moments like these allow us to feel better about ourselves by denigrating the decisions of others.
At any rate, all of this is annoying, inconsistent, jejune, lazy, and boring. Before I head outside to enjoy the pre-wildfire weather, I just wanted to pop on to say as much and, as always, to thank you for splurging on this little newsletter.
My father-in-law (81), who I love deeply, has many of these ideas of youth who are profligate spenders and not saving for or thinking of the future. Of course, he came from a time when you could work a summer job at the mill to save enough money for university and a car. The only way you can do that now is by being the originator of a crypto scam.
I think David that you are giving too much credit to marketers (I am one of them, full disclosure). Western / capitalist societies are built on the premise of the marketplace and consumption. The shift from spending money in restaurants to go after non-staple grocery items (or maybe organic stuff), points to a societal change in terms of going out vs. staying home, for example. The underlying concept (consumption) remains the same.