The American Consumer Is Moving — Just Not Where You'd Expect.
This post was written by Jodie Cabin and Sophia Silver, members of Horizon Media’s Future of Consumer & Culture team.
Holding the Line: The American Consumer in Q1 2026
Horizon Futures’ Consumer Pulse series tracks where the American consumer is heading. In our latest wave, something interesting showed up: people are starting to feel better, but they aren’t spending like it. Sentiment is moving. Wallets haven’t followed.
That gap is where Q2 lives. Holding the Line, the second installment of the series, digs into what’s behind it, what’s still keeping wallets closed, and where spending discipline is starting to slip. The series now tracks 7,000 U.S. adults across two waves, giving an ongoing read on where the consumer is actually heading.
What Hasn't Changed
Nearly half of Americans remain financially stressed, three-quarters say the economy shapes how they spend, and most households have nothing left to cut. Financial stress is no longer a rough patch, it’s the floor consumers are building on.
The personal sphere is still where people feel good. Optimism about family, hobbies, and personal growth all held within a point of Q4 ‘25. These are the parts of life consumers can maintain control of despite turbulence around them.
What's New
The Mood-Spend Gap
Total optimism ticked up 3 points this wave, with the biggest gains coming from the Financially Stressed (+7 points). The people with the most reason to worry are the ones whose outlook is improving. It’s not that things got better, it’s that the worst of it stopped getting worse.
But that optimism hasn’t translated into spending. Spending intentions across nearly every category are flat. Sixty-one percent of consumers plan to hold their spending exactly where it is. People are feeling better about the future without yet acting like it.
A Selective Thaw
The pessimism that defined Q4 is easing, but only in certain places. Healthcare and job-market worries saw the two largest declines this wave. Both drops trace back to specific moments of relief — ACA open enrollment closed without disruption, and the 43-day government shutdown ended — and Gen X and Boomers, the cohorts most exposed to those pressures, drove most of the movement.
Concerns about global affairs, public safety, and media trust didn’t budge. And worries about personal job security held flat. The relief is societal, not personal, and narrower than it looks.
Where Discipline Is Slipping
On the surface, spending discipline looks intact. Underneath, it’s fraying. A third of consumers now say they spend impulsively, up 4 points from Q4 and that’s rising fastest among people who are actively trying to cut back. Half feel overwhelmed by their finances.
Live events and culture is the only discretionary category posting real spending growth, with Millennials leading. When discipline frays, it’s fraying toward release-driven experiences. The dollars that are loosening aren’t buying things, they’re buying moments.
The AI Anxiety Story
AI adoption keeps climbing, now 69% of Americans now use AI at least monthly.
But the only AI attitude that moved this wave was the worry about being left behind. More than a third of consumers now agree they’re behind their peers on AI use, up 4 points.
The fear isn’t tied to unfamiliarity. The anxiety is climbing fastest among the heaviest users. Daily users in Gen X jumped 13 points on the metric. Boomers, 10. Even Gen Z’s daily users, the cohort least likely to feel behind on anything digital, moved up 7 points. The pattern holds across every generation. Fluency doesn’t insulate you.
Gen X as the Leading Indicator
Gen X moved more than any other generation this wave — on pessimism, on AI anxiety, and on impulse spending. Their position explains the pattern. They’re close enough to retirement to feel the pressure of not being there yet, but still years away from it, navigating a job market being reshaped by a technology they feel anxious about keeping pace with.
Whether the rest of the market follows in Q2 will determine whether Gen X was the leading indicator or an outlier.
What's Available
Holding the Line is now live, alongside the Consumer Pulse Interactive Dashboard — a new tool that lets readers filter the data by wave and demographics and pull the views most relevant to them.
👉Download the full Consumer Pulse Q1 2026 report below:
👉 Explore the Consumer Pulse Interactive Dashboard
👉 New to the Consumer Pulse? Start with our first report, Bracing for Impact