Consumers have lived through so many “unprecedented” times over the past five years that their flight-or-flight somatic responses may be inoculated against a certain level of disruption.
That was the takeaway from Kearney Consumer Institute’s latest Consumer Stress Index, which surveyed shoppers in 12 countries about how stressed they feel regarding finances, health and education, geopolitics and government, food and the environment, and innovation and technology.
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Mounting political pressures and trade policies seem to vacillate daily, but U.S. shoppers’ overall stress levels have only grown 0.2 percent since the global strategy and management consulting firm’s last survey in the fall. Notably, the surveys were run prior to President Donald Trump’s April 2 reciprocal duty announcements, though trade tensions have been percolating for some time, and the rhetoric has been nearly inescapable.
Despite widespread uncertainty about the implications of governmental policy and its long-term impacts on the markets, consumers have evinced a relatively steady level of stress year over year in North America, according to Katie Thomas, who leads the internal consumer think tank at Kearney. Rather than shirking spending—or sacrificing wants and needs—shoppers have been optimizing their budgets as they maintain a wait-and-see approach.
“What continues to surprise me the most is that we’re seeing much flatter consumer stress compared to a lot of the other indices,” she told Sourcing Journal. “You’re hearing a lot of this voiced stress, but then people are still spending.”
Sure enough, March retail numbers underscore the findings: total retail sales were up 0.6 percent from February, and 4.75 percent from the same period the year prior. The first three months of 2025 saw gains of 4.52 percent from 2024.
But Thomas cautions against misreading these numbers as resiliency; consumers aren’t buoyant, they’re keeping calm and carrying on.
“I would not want the takeaway to be that they’re not stressed about what’s going on financially, with their wallets, with politics—but it’s ebbing and flowing in different ways,” Thomas said. “They’re maintaining this level of stress, and for better or worse, they’ve also gotten used to living in this persistent uncertainty.”
Consumers are indeed aware and anxious about the shifting geopolitical landscape, even if it hasn’t made marked differences in their spending as of yet; Kearney’s data showed that globally, the number of consumers concerned about trade volatility grew 50 percent between Q3 2024 and Q1 2025. “Tariffs could be the end of true resilience of the consumer,” the analyst wrote in her analysis, noting that “all their savvy, thoughtfulness, and optionality” may no longer be feasible once the duties take effect.