Retail’s Consumer Outlook 2026: The K-Shape Isn’t a Chart Anymore – It’s Your Growth Model!
NRF 2026’s press panel exposed the uncomfortable truth: Gen Z is discount-driven, tech-native, and emotionally volatile and they’re dragging retail’s playbook into a new era.
By Carsten Krause
January 14, 2026
I joined NRF 2026 as official press and sat in on the “Consumer Outlook 2026” panel moderated by
- Mark Matthews (Chief Economist, Executive Director, NRF). Panelists included
- Maria Arand (Director, Office of the Customer, 84.51°),
- MaryLeigh Bliss (Chief Content Officer, YPulse), and
- Peter Volberding (Senior Director, Data Analytics, Pyxis by Bain & Company).
The headline from the room:
2026 won’t be won by “having a strategy.” It’ll be won by retailers who can operate three realities at once
- A resilient top line that masks brutal fragmentation underneath.
- A generation that treats discounting like a sport and shopping like a coping mechanism.
- A commerce stack where inspiration, payment, and purchase collapse into one dopamine-click loop.
Matthews set the stage with NRF’s holiday signal: 2025 holiday sales (Nov. 1–Dec. 31) grew 4.1% year-over-year. That’s strong—and it hides the story. Because the real panel wasn’t about “holiday sales.” It was about the new consumer operating system.
The top line is fine. The bottom line is where retailers (and other industries) get murdered…
Matthews framed it bluntly: yes, retail is “going strong,” and NRF put hard numbers behind that with the Retail Monitor calling out 4.1% holiday growth. But he immediately pivoted to what matters:
“there’s lots of stuff happening below that amongst various segments.” Mark Matthews, NRF
That’s economist-speak for: your customer base is splitting, your assortment is splitting, and your pricing strategy is splitting. Volberding brought the receipts using “outside-in” spend behavior (credit/debit panel insights and retailer-level trend visibility).
He didn’t use gentle language either. He basically told the room: the consumer didn’t disappear, but the consumer you’re profitable on is getting more concentrated. His most memorable warning was the kind you should print and tape to a CFO’s monitor:
“Top 10% account for 49% [of] spend in the U.S.” Peter Volberding (Pyxis by Bain & Company)
That’s the K-shaped economy in one line. The rest of his point was even nastier: in luxury categories, the concentration can be extreme (he cited watches/jewelry as heavily top-weighted, and the panel discussed how category dynamics skew hard at the top end).
This is where a lot of retail leaders get confused: they see strong sales and call it “resilience.” But resilience at the top can coexist with quiet collapse in the middle and bottom. And the panel made it clear: the 2026 retail playbook is going to punish anyone who markets to the “average consumer.”
Because in 2026, the “average consumer” is a fairy tale.
Gen Z didn’t kill Black Friday. They resurrected it, but on their own terms.
MaryLeigh Bliss (YPulse) was the sharpest voice in the room when it came to youth behavior mechanics and what moves Gen Z, how they interpret the world, and how they buy.
One of the best moments of the panel was when she called out something most executives still have backwards: Gen Z doesn’t just shape trends, but they carry them into adulthood.
“Looking at young consumers is really looking at the future of retail… as they age up, they don’t just shed the trends… they evolve and take those into different life stages.” MaryLeigh Bliss (YPulse)
Then she dropped two stats that should change how you plan Q4 forever:
- 75% of 18–24-year-olds planned to shop on Black Friday (she emphasized this was higher than any other group they survey).
- About 45% of 18–39-year-olds planned to use buy now, pay later (BNPL) for holiday purchases, a mainstream holiday behavior for younger cohorts.
Her quote that stuck with me was the one that explains why so many retail org charts are built for a world that no longer exists:
“They broke the marketing funnel, so it just doesn’t exist anymore.” MaryLeigh Bliss (YPulse)
That line isn’t a clever quip. It’s a business diagnosis.
If your digital team still runs linear attribution models like it’s 2016, you are measuring the wrong thing. If your store team still thinks the site’s job is “drive store traffic,” you’re missing the actual consumer workflow: they see it, they want it, they price-check it, they buy it—often without ever remembering your brand name.
TikTok isn’t a channel. It’s a store because it collapsed inspiration into checkout.
Volberding noted that online marketplaces were a major driver, and the panel explicitly called out TikTok Shop as part of the “marketplace machine.” Bliss backed it from the youth insight side and put a behavioral mechanism behind it:
“Social media is the number one place they are getting inspiration for gift ideas… that seamless experience of getting the inspiration on their feed and then [buying].” MaryLeigh Bliss (YPulse)
This isn’t theory. TikTok itself reported that the 2025 Black Friday/Cyber Monday period was its biggest ever, with nearly 50% more shoppers buying on TikTok Shop in the U.S. year-over-year and sales exceeding $500 million over the four-day period.
And the broader trend line isn’t subtle: EMARKETER said TikTok Shop made up nearly 20% of U.S. social commerce in 2025, and put total U.S. social commerce sales at $87.02B in 2025, with 2026 expected to surpass $100B.
That’s not “social strategy.” That’s a parallel retail universe.
And here’s the strategic punchline: when shopping becomes entertainment, the winning retailers aren’t necessarily the ones with the best merchandising. They’re the ones with the best conversion loop creator ecosystem, content velocity, price positioning, and frictionless payment.
BNPL isn’t just “payments.” It’s consumer mood insurance.
On stage, BNPL was described as a way younger consumers “spread those payments out over time.” That’s the polite version.
The less polite version is: BNPL is a coping tool for affordability anxiety.
Experian found 43% of consumers have used or plan to use BNPL for holiday shopping (Oct 2025 survey), up sharply versus its earlier benchmark. Meanwhile, the CFPB has been tracking market expansion and usage trends across 2019–2023 and beyond, underscoring that BNPL has grown from “niche” to “embedded.”
The panel’s bigger message is what retail leaders should pay attention to: BNPL is part of a pattern where consumers want the feeling of affordability even when affordability is deteriorating.
That’s a dangerous psychological lever for brands. It can juice conversion in the short term, and it can also boomerang into returns, delinquencies, and margin erosion if you don’t manage the full customer lifecycle.
The K-shaped grocery reality: essential doesn’t mean uniform.
Matthews pushed a sharp point: grocery is essential, but it’s not one thing. Maria Arand (84.51°) explained why “essential” categories still contain massive elasticity, and why value behavior doesn’t always mean “buy less.”
Her framework was the strongest executive-ready structure of the session. She described three buckets consumers use to adapt:
- Where they get food (restaurants vs in-home; retailer switching; shifting share of wallet)
- What they buy (trade down, brand-tier shifts, premium private label growth)
- How they save (smaller, frequent trips; deeper discount hunting; selective promo engagement)
Then she dropped the nuance most strategy decks miss:
“Cutting back sometimes actually looks like a splurge.” Maria Arand (84.51°)
Example: consumers skip a $100 restaurant visit, then spend $10 more on a better cut of meat at home. That’s not “downtrading.” That’s reallocation—and it destroys simplistic category forecasting.
She also made a point that should scare CPG leaders who think private label growth is purely low-end:
“We’re seeing the premium private label products actually driving a lot of the growth.” Maria Arand (84.51°)
The implication: consumers are not just trading down. They’re trading sideways—chasing a new definition of value that includes quality, convenience, control, and identity.
GLP-1 is not a healthcare story. It’s a demand shock.
Volberding name-dropped GLP-1 as a serious headwind—especially for restaurants and fast food and the data is starting to catch up to the narrative.
A Cornell University summary of research found that within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%, and spending at fast-food/limited-service eateries falls by about 8%.
Bain has also published on GLP-1-driven spend shifts and the downstream impacts across food categories.
If you run a restaurant chain, a snack brand, or anything that lives on impulse consumption, GLP-1 is not “an interesting trend.” It’s a structural variable in your demand equation.
And it’s going to intersect with Gen Z behavior in a way that’s going to confuse the hell out of your forecasting team: people will still spend; they’ll just spend differently.
Gen Z’s mental model: doom, distrust, and “little treat” logic
Bliss explained Gen Z’s economic outlook like this: recession expectations have been their baseline for years, and 56% say they don’t think the economy will improve in 2026 (as reported from YPulse surveying). She connected that to an emergent behavior pattern: consumers who feel the future is unstable may stop saving and start spending to feel better now.
She called it out directly:
“They see the world is aflame, but I’m going to continue to spend… because of that.” MaryLeigh Bliss (YPulse)
Then she tied the mechanics together: doom scrolling feeds doom spending; social content triggers impulse purchases; instant checkout delivers dopamine. That’s a modern commerce loop most retailers are structurally unequipped to compete against.
She also warned that trend cycles are collapsing:
- Gen Z is nostalgic with “no rules”
- Trends move too fast even for them to keep up (she cited 77% of 13–39-year-olds agree trends move too fast)
- Skinny jeans can be “back” before your supply chain has even cleared the last cycle
And in the AI era, she described Gen Z as becoming “AI detectives” suspicious of everything, demanding transparency, and defaulting to distrust unless proven otherwise.
This is where HI + AI = Elevated Collaborative Intelligence™ becomes a retail survival requirement, not a tech slogan. Because personalization and agentic commerce only work if retailers can balance:
- AI-driven speed and relevance
- Human trust-building and emotional connection
- Technology readiness (T) in the customer experience
- Risk (R) management around transparency, data use, and authenticity
That’s not a metaphor. That’s an operating model.
Agentic commerce is coming fast, because Gen Z already lives in chat
A question from the room called out Google’s moves around AI-led shopping. Bliss responded with a stat that should make every retail executive stop delegating AI to “the innovation team”:
“80% of 13 to 39-year-olds use a chat AI chatbot of some kind and ChatGPT is by far the number one.” — MaryLeigh Bliss (YPulse), as stated on the panel
Whether that exact figure matches every external dataset is less important than the direction: AI is becoming part of the shopping journey, and it’s moving faster than social commerce did.
Retailers should also note Adobe’s signal: Reuters reported Adobe Analytics saw BNPL usage rise nearly 10% year-over-year to $20B, and that AI-powered shopping assistant/chatbot usage spiked sharply during the holiday season.
Translation: the consumer is already training themselves to shop with assistance. The question is whether that assistant is yours, Google’s, TikTok’s, or someone else’s.
And if it’s not yours, you’re renting your customer.
What retailers should do in 2026: five moves that don’t require fairy dust
Here’s the executive action plan I walked away with based on the panel’s strongest signals and the public data now backing them:
1) Build a K-shaped strategy, not a “mass market” strategy
If top spenders are driving disproportionate growth, the retail portfolio needs explicit strategies for:
- premium and luxury (high margin, high sensitivity to asset-market headwinds)
- value and trade-down (volume, promo discipline, private label strategy)
- “middle compression” customers who are behaving like low-income cohorts in certain categories (as discussed by the panel)
2) Treat social commerce as a full P&L line, not a marketing experiment
If TikTok Shop is driving massive growth during peak periods and social commerce is on track toward $100B+ scale, you need:
- creator partnerships with measurable conversion
- product assortment designed for short-form discovery
- fast merchandising feedback loops (content performance → inventory decisions)
3) Tighten BNPL governance like it’s credit because it is
BNPL is a conversion lever and a risk lever. Retailers should:
- measure BNPL-driven returns, cancellations, and repeat behavior
- segment customers by payment behavior, not just demographics
- avoid discounting + BNPL stacking that quietly destroys margin
4) Re-engineer “value” beyond price premium private label proves it
Premium private label growth is telling you something: consumers want value that still feels like quality.
That means:
- invest in premium private label differentiation
- make value legible (quality signals, ingredient transparency, sourcing narratives)
- offer “controlled splurges” that replace restaurant spending with in-home upgrades
5) Prepare for GLP-1 demand shifts now before your category gets blindsided
Even modest penetration can shift demand in snacks, QSR, beverages, and grocery baskets. Retailers should:
- monitor basket composition changes and substitution patterns
- create GLP-1-aligned merchandising (protein-forward, nutrient-dense, smaller portions)
- be careful with “GLP-1 friendly” marketing claims and focus on truthful nutrition cues
The CDO TIMES Bottom Line
NRF 2026’s Consumer Outlook panel wasn’t a “consumer trends talk.” It was a warning shot.
The consumer is not disappearing. The consumer is fragmenting. And Gen Z armed with discount obsession, social commerce muscle memory, and a permanently anxious worldview is rewiring how discovery, trust, and purchase work.
If you’re a retailer walking into 2026 with a single pricing strategy, a single marketing funnel, and a single definition of “value,” you’re going to feel like you’re doing everything right… right up until your margin evaporates.
The winners will be the ones who can execute Elevated Collaborative Intelligence™ in the wild: using AI to personalize and accelerate commerce while using human intelligence to build trust, authenticity, and emotional connection, because in 2026, trust is the rarest inventory on your shelf.
NRF (Retail Monitor Dec 2025 data; published Jan 12, 2026)
https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/cnbc-nrf-retail-monitor-s-december-data-shows-strong-holiday-season-spending
NRF (Holiday forecast; published Nov 6, 2025)
https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/nrf-expects-holiday-sales-to-surpass-1-trillion-for-the-first-time-in-2025
Adobe (Cyber Monday release; Dec 2, 2025)
https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/12/adobe-cyber-monday-hits-record
Cornell University (GLP-1 impact on food spending; Dec 19, 2025)
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/12/ozempic-changing-foods-americans-buy
Bain (GLP-1 spend impacts snapshot)
https://www.bain.com/insights/weight-loss-drug-users-spend-less-on-groceries-fast-food-snap-chart/
CFPB (BNPL market overview; Dec 10, 2025)
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/the-buy-now-pay-later-market/
Reuters via Adobe holiday season coverage (Jan 2026)
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-online-holiday-spending-hits-record-levels-despite-slower-growth-adobe-says-2026-01-07/
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