How Young People Spend Their Money

An article in The Economist collected insights about how young people shop ... and most of them were totally obvious. Young people have a lower attention span, expect delivery times to be faster, use their phones to pay, like buy-now-pay-later apps, care about a brand's values, use social media to discover products and want instant gratification. Nothing surprising there.

I did find two points buried in the story that felt a little more significant. First, the article notes that young consumers "like subscriptions, often favouring shared access to products rather than outright ownership." In addition, they "often shun a weekly shop for quicker fixes of everything from fashion to furniture."

The first point about sharing versus owning is already transforming industries and is likely to be one of the most important generational shifts in consumption. And the second about "quicker fixes" suggests that the old model of a big shopping day or the concept of spending a day at a mall shopping is becoming less appealing than quick shopping trips with perhaps more impulse buys.