Key takeaways
- Consumer confidence is rising across major markets, but behavioral data tells a different story. Spending intentions remain flat to negative, saving habits are unchanged, and the gap between how consumers feel and what they actually do has become one of the defining features of 2026.
- Consumers have absorbed years of volatility to the point where instability no longer registers as disruption; it is simply the new normal. The improvement in sentiment reflects adaptation, not optimism about what comes next.
- Growth in this environment is volume and occasion-led, not sentiment-led. Brands and retailers that are still planning around a spending rebound are designing for a consumer who no longer exists. The opportunity lies in meeting the consumer who has already decided what spending looks like for them.
For the past two years, the question hanging over global retail has been the same: when do consumers start spending again? When WILL the post-inflation recovery show up in the numbers? This year, the answer looks like it has finally come. Consumer confidence numbers look good. Sentiment is up across most major markets. Households report feeling more financially stable than they did a year ago. The mood, at least as measured by survey after survey, has shifted.
It probably won’t translate the way brands are hoping.
NielsenIQ’s Consumer Outlook: Guide to 2026, drawing on purchase data across 54 markets, shows almost every behavioral metric holding flat. Six in ten consumers are still actively seeking secondary income streams. Discretionary spending intentions are flat to negative. AlixPartners, surveying more than 13,000 consumers globally, puts the net intent score for reduced spending at -18 percentage points — more than 60% greater than last year’s projected contraction.
The recovery, it seems, will be more nuanced, and considerably more difficult for the industry to plan around.
The spending gap
The data tells a more specific story than the sentiment surveys suggest. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index rose to 91.8 in March — a modest improvement — yet the same report describes consumer spending in 2026 as focused on “cheap thrills and necessary services.” Restaurants, beauty products, streaming subscriptions. The categories that feel affordable without feeling like a sacrifice. Anything more expensive remains largely untouched.
NielsenIQ’s US household data shows Health & Beauty (+8%), Baby Care (+7%), Food (+4%) and Pet Care (+4%) all growing. These are essentials and near-essentials; that is, the purchases consumers will protect regardless of how uncertain things feel. What is falling away is everything else: out-of-home entertainment, clothing and apparel, food delivery, fresh produce, fresh meat and dairy. Consumers are not cutting indiscriminately, but they are cutting with consistency.
EY-Parthenon’s Consumer Sentiment Survey, published in June, found Americans entering summer 2026 with stable household finances and softening financial confidence at the same time — cutting back on travel, dining out, and leisure even as they described themselves as doing reasonably well. Feeling financially secure and choosing to spend are no longer reliably connected. As EY’s Americas Retail Sector Leader Mark Chambers noted, consumers are making “deliberate, trade-off-driven spending decisions amid ongoing economic and geopolitical uncertainty.”
Meanwhile, AlixPartners puts the net global intent score for reduced spending at -18 percentage points — more than 60% greater than last year’s projected contraction. And NielsenIQ’s data offers perhaps the sharpest illustration of where things actually stand: consumers today spend $106 for what cost them $100 in 2023, with purchase volumes essentially flat.
A different kind of stable
There is a tempting explanation for all of this: consumers are simply being careful, the scars of three inflationary years take time to fade, and spending will follow confidence once people feel certain enough that conditions have genuinely stabilized. It is a reasonable read. And it is probably the wrong one.
What the data points to instead is something that has already happened rather than something still in progress. NielsenIQ describes a consumer who has absorbed volatility to the point where it no longer registers as disruption. For them, it is just the new normal. The improvement in sentiment may therefore say less about expectations of better times ahead than about an acceptance of the state already in place.
McKinsey’s State of the Consumer 2026 frames the same shift through what it calls the rise of the resourceful consumer; a shopper who has permanently recalibrated their relationship with spending in ways that are unlikely to simply unwind when conditions ease. Across its global research, McKinsey found that perceived value now outranks affordability as a purchase driver in every market studied. Consumers are not simply looking for cheaper, they are looking for value that feels justified. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Consumer Products Outlook puts a harder number on it: 47% of consumers globally, including 35% of high-income households, now actively sacrifice convenience to keep costs down.
A different brief for 2026
If consumer behavior has genuinely recalibrated rather than simply paused, then the picture across the industry is more complicated than the consumer confidence numbers suggest. Much of what is currently being planned assumes that sentiment, given enough time, translates into spending. The data collected across this past year makes that assumption difficult to sustain.
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Retail Industry Outlook, drawing on a survey of 330 retail executives, found that 79% expect bargaining power to shift further toward retailers over the next two to three years — away from brands and manufacturers — driven by private label growth, retailer scale, and the data advantages that come from owning the customer relationship directly. In a market where consumer sentiment is cautious and value is the dominant currency, retailers who control the shelf and the data are better positioned than brands who do not.
NielsenIQ is clear about where growth really comes from in this environment: it is volume and occasion-led. Brands need to recognize that the opportunity is not in waiting for consumers to feel confident enough to spend more freely, it is in earning more occasions and more units from a consumer who has already decided what their spending looks like. That means tighter assortments, propositions that are easier to justify, and a retail strategy less dependent on price.
BCG’s Five Consumer Behavior Shifts Reshaping Growth in 2026 adds a detail that changes the picture further: AI is now doing much of the filtering before a consumer ever actively compares options. The shortlist of brands under consideration is increasingly being assembled by an algorithm rather than built through browsing. Brands that are absent from search, retail media, and AI-driven discovery are being removed from consideration well before the point of purchase.
Make no mistake, consumers in 2026 have already decided how they want to spend, what they are willing to pay, and what they expect in return. The industry’s task is to meet that consumer where they are.
