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With the holiday season fast approaching, American companies are gearing up for an end-of-year spending splurge that will hopefully close out 2025 on a high note. After all, the period that covers Thanksgiving and Black Friday through to New Year’s usually brings with it a nearly trillion-dollar burst of consumer spending—which should be a welcome reprieve from a year that has seen many businesses struggling to navigate an ever-changing slate of tariffs. But that fourth-quarter boost may prove underwhelming this year, at least if consumers’ predictions about their own spending habits are to be trusted. In a new survey of more than 1,000 American adults—conducted in late September by the market research firm HarrisX, and including questions developed by Inc.—40 percent of respondents said they anticipate their holiday gift budget will be smaller than it was last year. That’s compared to 21 percent who expect it to grow, and another 32 percent who expect it to stay more or less the same. That hesitancy is more pronounced among women than men—with 44 percent of women anticipating less spending versus 35 percent of men—and grows steeper with age, rising from 27 percent in Gen Z all the way up to 51 percent in the Silent Generation, and increasing with each successive age cohort. “Men seem to be having the high time of it, and women seem to be really concerned about the economy,” said Mark Penn, chairman and CEO of Stagwell, the parent company behind HarrisX. “It is really kind of a tale of two cities.” Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation That may partially be a reflection of partisan differences between men and women, he added, as Democrats tend to be more pessimistic about the economy than Republicans, and women are leaning increasingly liberal. The upshot for retailers prepping for the holiday gift season? Put the men’s items closer to the front of the stores, Penn suggests, and move the women’s clothing a bit further back. The HarrisX polling found that those gendered dynamics extend beyond just Christmas gifts, too. When asked whether their personal financial situation had gotten better or worse over the last six months, 42 percent of men said things have gotten better (versus 30 percent saying worse), whereas among women, the split was 20 percent better and 38 percent worse. Overall, though, there’s a level of ambivalence in the polling data. When asked about how their overall household spending has changed in the past six months, 29 percent of respondents said it has increased and 29 percent said it has decreased. The remaining 42 percent reported that their habits have pretty much stayed the same. “This poll reflects neither euphoria nor dejection,” Penn said. “It’s actually sort of in the middle of things. Americans remain somewhat pessimistic about the economy, but they’ve been that way for a very long time.” For those who said they’ve spent more, the leading reason why was a “desire to enjoy life/spend more in the present” (23 percent)—while more than half of those who reported decreasing their spending blamed it on inflation. Yet in almost every specific bucket of spending that the poll asked respondents about—restaurants, clothes, consumer tech, entertainment and travel—more respondents said their household had cut back on spending over the last six months than the number who reported having increased it. Only for groceries did more respondents raise their budgets (37 percent) rather than shrink them (20 percent)–which makes sense given that the steepest cuts of all were to dining out, which 47 percent of respondents said they’ve reduced. Indeed, 55 percent of survey respondents said they’ve swapped out some of their usual product purchases for cheaper alternatives over the last six months—and 31 percent anticipate reducing household spending over the next six months, versus 20 percent expecting to increase it. Travel is the vertical for which the largest chunk of respondents, 48 percent, said they plan to cut spending going forward, while groceries was again the only category for which more people are planning to increase spending over the next six months (30 percent) than decrease it (22 percent). Penn cautioned that respondents’ predictions about their future spending behavior may be a better indicator of how they feel about the current economy, rather than what they’ll actually do in the future. “They don’t really know how they’re going to feel six months from now,” he says. “Six months in the American economy is a long time. In six months, we could be in a recession or we could be doing 3 percent growth and [have] lower interest rates.” The HarrisX poll also asked respondents about a few different policy areas which Inc. has been covering in recent months. Among those were President Trump’s recent tax and domestic policy package (AKA the “Big Beautiful Bill”), which 39 percent of respondents said has made their household financially worse off, versus 24 percent saying better off; the cryptocurrency-regulating Genius Act, which 57 percent of respondents said they were unaware of; and employee stock ownership, with 65 percent of respondents saying they’d be interested in getting paid partially with equity in their employer.
