2026년 2월 11일 · Unknown · financial · 출처 Yahoo Finance
US retail sales were flat in December, while data from PwC shows that while wealthy Americans spent more over the holidays, middle and low-income consumers spent less. PwC US consumer markets industry leader Ali Furman and Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Brooke DiPalma discuss some of the signs showing that the US is experiencing a K-shaped economy.
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Video Transcript
00:00 Speaker A
Ally, I got to start on these retail sales. And I've seen some speculation, well, sales, you know, promotions by retailers keep coming earlier and earlier. So maybe people spent all the money in November and then they were done done with all their holiday shopping by December. Is is that a realistic way to think about it? What do you think?
00:20 Speaker B
I I think that's the data coming in this morning is very interesting. When we look at year-over-year data, what we're seeing is actually a stronger than expected holiday season. Holidays spend was up 6.4% year-over-year across all generations and that includes all payment types. So we're talking credit card, debit, buy now pay later, even Snap is included in our numbers. So when you break that down to your point about K-curve economy,
00:54 Speaker B
it does validate that we are in a K-curve economy. Uh the high-income cohort, 125k household income or higher spent 29% more on holiday year over year, where the mid and low-income cohorts actually pulled back about 4% and their share also changed. It went down about 2. 2 to 5% and the high income share increased share of total holiday spend by about 7%. So we do see that divergence. So although it's a story about growth year over year, there's certainly a bifurcation between income cohorts. And to your point, we know the low and middle-income cohort are spending more of their wallets on essentials, cost of living expenses, leaving left less leftover for holiday.
01:21 Speaker A
Yeah. I mean, and this is what we've been hearing from companies also specifically. I mean, we were talking earlier about Coca-Cola and all of these consumer products retailers that are trying to tweak their offerings, tweak their tweak their pricing, figure out what the sweet spot is that keeps people buying their products, but at the same, you know, but at the same time doesn't like wither away their margins.
01:43 Speaker C
Yeah, and what we were talking about was just this key lingo word within the industry was price pack architecture. Everyone's trying to switch around just how many cans are included within the Coca-Cola pack. And that's what we heard from Coca-Cola's CEO when I was on the phone with him this morning. He ultimately said that they're playing into this, that the low-income consumer is playing into value, even going to more dollar stores in order to get the best bang for their buck. But as we've heard from many different C-suite executives, is that the K-shaped economy is continuing and also value is super important. Take a listen to what people have been telling us so far this season.
02:20 Speaker D
60% of our consumers, average household income is over $100,000 a year, and they're still spending in this, uh, in this tough economy.
02:30 Speaker E
The middle lower-income consumer, quite stable, same as last quarter, but still very stretched in their budgets, trying to be choiceful and and cautious on how they spend their money.
02:46 Speaker F
One out of three units now that we um that we move uh are are everyday essentials and what we find there is that the more the customers can rely on us for um uh for everyday essentials and and the lower ASP items, uh they they just choose to do more of their downstream shopping with us.
03:10 Speaker C
And what's so interesting is just consumers really focusing in on essentials as you noted, but also these companies trying to tackle, okay, we have higher costs, higher prices maybe because of those tariffs that are finally going through. and we want consumers to ultimately buy more still in this environment where they're still choiceful and cautious or like the words we've been hearing over and over again.
03:32 Speaker A
Well, I guess the question is, Ally, what's going to change this?
03:36 Speaker B
Right. Oh, that's a great question. So what could ease this K-curve economy? So a few things, right? We could see uh inflation that's been pretty persistent, subside a bit. That could help. Uh the housing market could improve. We did see some slight improvement in the back half of calendar 25. If that continues or improves further, that could help. We also are seeing this disconnect between GDP growth and GDP projected growth and wage growth. Um if that gap closes, that could also improve, right? We're not seeing super high unemployment, but we're seeing higher than usual underemployment. So people that have part-time jobs are having trouble getting full-time jobs and people that don't yet have jobs, you know, it's a little harder in this environment to get a job. And a lot of those are younger generations of consumers under 30 and that's our future consumer. So if that improves, which it might because you have disruptions out there like weight loss drugs. I talk about that all the time, right? New brands, new products, new industries could be created through this physiological disruption. You know, we could see improvement.
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