Buy less, pay more

Posted on: 24 June 2026

For at least two years the same story has hardened into something that feels like a law of nature: the youngest generation buys less, chooses second-hand, rewards sustainable brands and has stopped measuring its worth in objects. A generation that has finally grasped that possession does not fill the hole. Every consumer report repeats it with the same moral satisfaction, as though describing a collective conversion to thrift. The comfortable version always puts me on guard, because more often than not it conceals a less flattering mechanism, and here the mechanism is real.

Beneath the language of values the data complicates the story, and in a direction worth looking at closely. The retreat in spending in 2026 is real but broad, and it reaches even high earners, whom AlixPartners records in net retreat for the first time in years, calling the phenomenon what it is, a structural reset of the very idea of value under economic pressure rather than a philosophical choice. What the generational narrative avoids is that the only group intending to spend more next year is the under thirty-fives. The young are not, then, the ones cutting most in absolute terms, they are the ones reallocating beneath an income ceiling that remains real. And it is the reallocation, not renunciation as such, that needs explaining.

I stop here before taking the cynical shortcut, because it would be lazy and, to my mind, also false. To say it is merely poverty dressed as virtue does not hold, since someone genuinely squeezed buys the cheapest thing without further thought, not the dearer version with the label. Value does have purchasing power. The sound reading is another: the constraint fixes the ceiling on spending while the values do real allocation underneath it. The young person with little does not choose whether to spend, but where, and it is within that narrow choice that sustainability, experience and education become real criteria. The share that goes to education, which in N26's European figures approaches a quarter of the budget, is not a story, it is the precise place where the remaining money lands.

And it is precisely on the seam between ceiling and allocation that capital has slipped in, because the system has discovered something worth more than any campaign: renunciation can be resold. Deloitte's global survey reports that 64 per cent of the young say they would pay a premium for the sustainable product, against 36 per cent who still prefer the cheaper one. In margin terms this means the brand extracts more value per unit precisely from those who, in each act, choose less and better. The charity shop, once the unglamorous end of the high street, has meanwhile been reborn as the resale app that takes its cut on every gesture of thrift, monetising the circulation of what once stayed outside the market. The anti-consumption narrative does not harm capital, it reprices it.

Bourdieu, studying the French working classes of the 1970s, named it precisely: the taste for necessity, the mechanism by which one makes a virtue of what one is forced into, converting the absence of choice into sincere appreciation of the little one has. Britain has its own version of the figure, the wartime make do and mend that turned rationing into a moral posture. What I see today is the same figure, recast though in the language of sustainability and generational identity, and that translation makes it monetisable in a way that was closed to the working class of half a century ago. Bourdieu's poor man made a virtue of necessity and stayed poor. Today's young person makes necessity into distinction, and someone sells him the price of that distinction. It is Akerlof in reverse, where the signal ends up worth more than the good it is meant to accompany.

And here comes the knot an honest piece cannot sidestep, because it seems to contradict everything. The same generation that declares sustainability in every survey is the one feeding the vertical growth of ultra fast fashion, with Shein at the front, the most unsustainable production model ever built. It looks like hypocrisy and the easy comment would leave it there, but on closer inspection it is not, it is rather the signature of the mechanism. The declared and the enacted do not coincide because they do not operate on the same plane. The declared is the layer that legitimises, the enacted follows the constraint. One buys Shein because it is cheap and declares sustainability because it is the dialect in which that generation recognises itself, so the gap between the two is not duplicity in the individual but a structure that produces together both the renunciation and its ennobling story, and it is exactly in that gap that the margin makes its home.

A question remains that I prefer to leave open, because the honest answer is that we do not know it. What becomes of these values on the day the constraint loosens. If incomes rose, would sustainability hold, or evaporate as a preference we could afford only when we could afford nothing else. Sour grapes, in its retail edition. I do not have the clean counterfactual, since the affluent Gulf Gen Z now raising its spending confounds income with social norm and so does not isolate the variable, which is to say the wealthy young of the West are not numerous enough to settle the account. The brands, for their part, do not wait for the answer, they have already priced both outcomes, the renunciation of those who have not and the return of those who will, and whatever that future income decides, the premium has already been banked.