Highlight Showcase: Gifts to groceries 2025

Highlight Showcase 2025: From Gifts to Groceries

In this session of Highlight Showcase 2025

Join Highlight’s Senior Digital & Content Manager, Chelsea Stone, as she shares insights from our second annual proprietary research on grocery shopping habits, discretionary spending, and shifting consumer budgets through the end of 2025 and beyond. Learn how ongoing economic uncertainty is shaping choices — from day-to-day essentials to seasonal splurges — and what these trends mean for businesses and brands moving forward.

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Automated webinar transcript

Chelsea Stone:      Hi everybody. We're just gonna give everyone a minute or two more to join, and then we're gonna kick things off. I hope everyone has had an amazing day. I have really enjoyed these sessions. I've gotten nice and cozy in my seat watching all these sessions. I can't believe it's my turn to go now.

Alright, I think we're at critical mass here, so we're gonna jump right into your final session of Highlight Showcase 2025. Thank you so much for joining us, not just for this final session, but for this whole day. I have always learned so much from our panelists and our customers who join us, so can't appreciate our gratitude enough for joining today. In this final session, we are going to look at, I mean, perhaps I'm biased, but I think it's my favorite session of showcase, the original research that we source from our community of highlighters across the country. This year we're looking at the same topic we looked at last year, consumer sentiment currently, and how we expect that to evolve as we move into the holiday season here.

But what's particularly exciting about this year is that we have last year's data as well. So we're gonna look at year-over-year changes. So we're gonna kick things off first by telling you who I am. My name is Chelsea Stone. I am Senior Manager of Digital and Content Marketing here at Highlight.

So I have the great privilege of pulling original research from our highlighter community on a regular basis, but also I get to moderate sessions like this one quite often. So if you wanna find, not just my sessions, but all of our past sessions, please visit our website at letshighlight.com, go to our resources menu, and then if you look under eBooks, webinars and more you'll find these and many more.

For those of you that don't know, highlighter is the name that we affectionately use for members of our nationwide community. We are over 60,000 nationwide, and we are picky. We pride ourselves on a lower acceptance rate than average because we are so set on finding folks who are earnest, dedicated, and articulate in their responses.

Our admission survey will contain things like red herring questions to make sure that folks are actually reading the questions and choosing answers carefully. We have open-ended questions to make sure that folks aren't just saying, no, I don't like this product, but in fact are saying, no, I don't like this product because of X, Y, and Z.

Excuse me. We're also able to look at really targeted consumer groups, which is exciting. Of course, we grow our community to reflect the general population, but we've also found we have more and more customers who are interested in speaking to niche consumer audiences.

Last year we surveyed just over 1,600 folks. This year we had a slightly bigger pool of 2,000 plus. And like last year, just over half of them live in a single income household. We also saw some changes year over year. Last year we had sort of a bigger middle represented, whereas this year we're closer to a third and a third and a third when it comes to representation of total household income which was nice to see.

So, for example, if you're going after high net worth consumers, you can segment by those with household incomes over $300,000, for example.

We also saw some change in the ages of folks who responded to this, giving me a lot of joy because for us it was a sign of hard work paying off. Well, first of all, you can see that a majority was and still remains millennial and Gen X respondents, which doesn't surprise me, given that I'm myself am an older millennial.

But what was really cool to see this year is we saw a market increase in the number of baby boomer respondents, and we even saw some silent generation respondents. That is such a testament to the work that our community team is doing to make our response process, our feedback process as easy and user-friendly as possible. Our app is so cool and it has gotten even better over this past year to make it really easy and accessible for respondents to provide their feedback.

Question number one that we kicked off with was compared to this time last year, how have your stress levels related to money changed? And what we saw here was consistency. Last year, 66% of respondents said they were more stressed; 65% said the same thing in 2025.

When it comes to groceries specifically, we asked, are you more or less concerned about the cost of groceries? We saw the same consistency. Last year 81% of respondents were more concerned about the cost of groceries; this year, 80% expressed concern over the cost of groceries.

Luckily, it's not spiking, but it does reflect the new normal that we as a society are all trying to wrap our heads around. The data that you're seeing right here is actually key research comparing prices from January 2020 to August 2025. Overall, the average of 28% increase across all aisles in the grocery store since 2020.

Last year, we asked folks if they are making fewer just-for-fun purchases, and 63% said that was the case. This year we saw that jump up to 70%. When we ask what folks are doing to save money, it appears they're doing less. The only tactic that increased year over year was fewer just-for-fun purchases.

So, next year what I'm really looking forward to doing is adding a qualitative component to questions like these in the survey. We can add video responses with the Highlight platform. This will help to understand the drivers of these behaviors we're seeing.

Likewise with groceries, we are seeing a similar story. Folks are doing slightly less across the board to relieve the stress they feel from increased grocery shops. The only category we saw increase year over year was that folks are switching to store brands.

When we asked folks what stores sell your favorite store brands? Walmart is at the top of the list, and I don't think that will surprise anyone. However, Aldi is moving up year over year from 28% to 32% in 2025.

When we go back to this question around where have you actually shopped in the past three months? We see Walmart is still at the top of this list. But we also see Amazon moving up to number two, which is hardly surprising given the convenience. So, in a time where folks are saying that they're trying to make fewer just-for-fun purchases, it makes sense that Amazon would nab the number two spot here.

As we look to the holiday season, we saw a significant change in responses year-over-year. When we asked, where do you plan to splurge this holiday season? The number one answer this year is that people don't have plans to splurge at all, at 38%. Last year, it was the sixth most popular answer.

Among millennial women, their biggest plan is to splurge on kids' products; for Gen Z women, their top choice for splurging is beauty and personal care. This generational difference is interesting to see as both cohorts plan their spending for the upcoming holiday season.

As we look ahead to 2026, there's a consistency in the proportion of folks saying that they think their budget is likely to just stay the same — 40%. However, there was a growth in pessimism, with 37% of respondents saying they thought managing their budget would get harder next year.

In conclusion, we have a mission here to counter the pessimism that some people might be feeling in this economy. Our goal is to bring them lower-cost ways to treat themselves, show the value of the products we offer, and be a source of optimism and joy.

Thank you all so much for attending.