With the crucial holiday shopping season merely weeks away, retail leaders are more pessimistic about consumers’ confidence to spend in the face of rising inflation than consumers themselves indicate. Forty-five per cent of retail executives assume consumers will spend less for formal or more dressy apparel, whereas only 20 per cent of US consumers agree.
While 77 per cent of retail executives believe consumers are moderately to extremely concerned about recession, only 57 per cent of consumers expressed the same concern, according to a report conducted by First Insight in partnership with Women’s Wear Daily (WWD). The report titled ‘The Inflation Disconnect Between Retail Executives and Consumers’ reveals that retail executives also think that consumers are cutting back more significantly than consumers say they are across multiple categories, potentially creating a more promotionally-driven — and therefore less profitable — holiday season than may be warranted.
Fifty-two per cent of retailers believe that consumers are reducing their spend on apparel, footwear, and accessories because of higher prices when, in fact, only 40 per cent of consumers indicate that they are doing so.
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