Analyzing Gen Z spending trendsfrom @caseymorrowlewis

Transcript

We're in the midst of a pretty fascinating economic moment. CNBC says younger consumers are eating less Chipotle and Kava. They're buying more Coach bad. Business Insider doubles down on this saying cash squeeze Gen Zers and millennials are bringing down America's favorite sloppable chains. These two TikToks came up on my feed recently. The sloppable epidemic is out of hand and there's a sloppable reckoning in the stock market. While sweet green, kava, and chipotle all are seeing sales soften in q3, Tapestry, who is the owner of Coach, has never been better largely because of Gen z spenders. I think what we're seeing is a softening on little treat culture. After years of student debt and inflation and economic precarity, going to Sweetgreen and getting a bowl of overpriced slaw no longer has the same appeal as it once did. We no longer feel that emotional boost from a bowl of grains that we can make for $2. At the same time, buying something like a new coach bag, which is maybe a couple of $100, you have to save up for it or you have to rely on Klarna. You can actually point to and say, this is something that I invested in. Fortune actually ties this into the idea of conspicuous consumption. Quiet luxury is dead, they say. Instead, young people want to have status items that they can actually show off something that is photogenic or telegenic or TikTok genic. In addition to being something that they can walk around and wear proudly and display to signal that they're in the know, they can also post about it on Instagram and TikTok across social media, and also indicate to a wider audience that they are spending in the right way worse another cover bowl which you don't get the same sort of clout. We're talking about bigger rank purchases over smaller daily ones. The culture of microindulgence is very much evolving, but at the same time, little tier culture isn't softening that much because look at this story.