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Katie Thomas notices everything in her local mall: How clothes in the window display of an athleisure store switched from blues to browns overnight. How Nordstrom aisles are spaced so they seem quiet, but spawn swarms of people carrying the branded bags. How many teenagers — a gaggle of boys! — are here on a school night, actually shopping, loaded with bags.

As a teen, Thomas had worked and hung out at Ross Park Mall. Now it's where she does reconnaissance as a retail expert. Part anthropologist and part oracle, Thomas leads the Kearney Consumer Institute, a think tank inside a consulting firm used by some of the biggest retailers and brands. Her job is to divine what our shopping habits tell us about our economy and our future.

"Are you shopping today just for fun? Holiday shopping?" Thomas asks a woman carrying bags from Madewell, J.Crew and White House Black Market. She learns it's a bit of both — the woman has a new pleather jacket for herself and sunglasses for her daughter.

As Thomas peers into her crystal ball — a muddle of government and corporate data, surveys and research, things she sees and hears from shoppers and retail workers — she has put her finger on a new driving force of the American shopper.

"What it actually all goes back to is control," she says. "They're trying to figure out what they can control in a world where they feel a sheer loss of control."

Lurched from a worldwide pandemic into surging 

 and an unstable world order, people are finding agency in their own spending. And it's changing how they shop this holiday season and into 2026.

"I'm calling it the frugal consumer," says Thomas. Not frugal in the old-fashioned penny-pinching and reusing-grandma's-tinfoil sense, she explains, "but I mean, we're seeing exhaustion that extends far beyond the wallet. Where am I spending my money, my time, my energy – how am I distributing that in a world that has felt so exhausting lately?"

Finding ways to assert ourselves through shopping

The longing for control and agency shows up in different ways. There are the shopper boycotts — think of the crises at 

, among the biggest ones in recent years. There's the refusal to pay higher prices for name-brand groceries as shoppers of all incomes switch to store-brand items they never used to buy, including chips and candy. And there's a growing shift in aesthetic.

The pandemic had us cocooning in neutrals and comfy-cozies, fueling the millennial obsession with "quiet luxury," beiges and pastels. But now color and maximalism have roared back into our homes and closets, with bold prints and 

"We want to be loud. We want to be individuals. We want to feel seen," Thomas says.

"I've even heard from employees in this mall," she says, gesturing down the festively lit, echoey hallway, "people are spending on the 'wow' piece, not the basic — something fun."

Splurging on the "wow" piece is difficult to slot into the common narrative about the American shopper: that consumers are cautious, on edge, tightening their budgets.

That's because two seemingly contradictory things are happening in the economy. Consumer sentiment — a gauge of how people feel about the financial situation in the U.S. and in their own homes — is 

near the lowest it's been since the pandemic

. Yet retail spending continues to grow, with holidays expected to set another record.

The National Retail Federation, an industry trade group, forecasts our holiday spending will, for the first time, 

. Thomas's forecast is less exuberant, but still higher than ever.

"I think we often miss the psychological piece of it," she says. "It's not just where are consumers spending their dollars? It's the why and the how."

The "why" right now is the season of celebration and gift-giving, a search for joy as a reprieve from the dim economic outlook people tend to share with pollsters. And shopping offers a tinge of control and normalcy: Thomas found that in the depths of pandemic shutdowns, going out to shop was among the top things people reported missing the most.

And the "how" right now has to do with who's shopping and with what money. Most of the spending has been 

, many of whom might be invested in the strong stock market or seeing the value of their homes rise. But others are shopping, too. While it's been harder to find a new job in the past several months, 

, and wages have been growing faster than inflation.

being choosy and laser-focused on deals, as retailers from Walmart to Macy's to Dick's Sporting Goods have repeated all year.

"Guests are choiceful, stretching budgets and prioritizing value," Target executive Richard Gomez 

For the holidays, Thomas is noticing shoppers second-guessing and skipping some of the extras — just one more stocking stuffer or a little treat as a self-gift — that people might have dropped into their baskets without much thought during the 

Thomas's gut-check-the-extras theory quickly proves itself on her recent stroll through Ross Park Mall, as she talks with the shopper carrying Madewell and J.Crew bags. Shea Harmison, who's visiting from West Virginia, thinks about how her holiday spending might differ this year.

"I'll probably just try not to buy as much nonsense stuff," Harmison says. "Not spending money on things that I don't think are going to be useful or they might not use… Stuff to buy just to buy, you know?"

And Thomas predicts — in a forecast that's shared by online-spending trackers such as Adobe Analytics — this means stores may have to offer deeper discounts than they'd anticipated this holiday season, to try to shake loose that urge for control.

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Retail expert Katie Thomas scours her local shopping mall in Pittsburgh to divine what Americans' shopping habits reveal about the economy and the nation's future.

What will holiday shopping say about the state of America? An expert hunts for clues

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