2025年消费者状态：当变革成为常态

Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods PracticesState of the Consumer 2025: When disruptionbecomes permanent Five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers’ crisis-era habits have lingered. Here’s what organizations can do in the newenvironment to outcompete in the second half of the decade. This article is a collaborative effort by Becca Coggins, Christina Adams, and Kari Alldredge, withAlyssa Hopcus, Justin Shamoun, and Laura Bucklin, representing views from McKinsey’s Retail andConsumer Package Goods Practices. At the start of the decade,consumers adopted a slew of new behaviors—almost overnight—inresponse to the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote work, digital connectivity, and solo activities becamethe norm for life in lockdown. Today, the world has reopened, but the era of uncertainty and its impact on consumers linger. Globally, consumer sentiment is still poorer on average than it was at the beginning of 2020, andconsumers remain concerned about rising prices and inflation. Despite this persistent uncertainty,they keep spending. In fact, therelationship between sentiment and spending has weakened.Meanwhile, consumers’ expectations for value and convenience have them making unexpectedtrade-offs across categories: trading down in one place while simultaneously splurging on somethingelse. These choices may be confusing to anyone trying to predict what consumers will do next. It’s not that today’s consumers are irrational; it’s that the old frameworks used to decipher theirbehavior no longer apply. What once seemed like short-term adaptations born of the COVID-19pandemic have solidified into lasting behavioral change. As the world heads into the second half ofthe decade, consumer-facing companies confront new challenges, but knowing how to decipher anunpredictable consumer can help them stay agile and relevant. From an analysis of the McKinsey ConsumerWise Sentiment Survey and State of the ConsumerMarket Survey data, we have identified five behavioral forces that will shape the sector in the yearsahead and four strategic imperatives to position organizations for growth.1(Whilegrowth in emergingmarkets and global demographic shifts, such as an aging global population and lower averagebirth rates, are also reshaping the consumer landscape, this article focuses on the sticky consumerbehavioral changes that we see affecting the world’s largest markets.) Five COVID-19-era dynamics that arestillshaping the consumer sector At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers adopted new behaviors extremely quickly,and some of those behaviors have endured. To understand how consumers have changed, McKinseyConsumerWise Sentiment Survey questioned more than 25,000 consumers in 18 markets thattogether account for around 75 percent of global GDP.2Their answers, as well as those of participantsin the State of the Consumer Market Survey, reveal how today’s consumers spend their time, who theytrust, and how they ascribe value. 1. People are spending more time alone and online The behaviors that consumers adopted for coping with life under COVID-19 lockdown—namely, areliance on digital connectivity and at-home activities—are now permanent parts of their daily lives.Globally, consumers still spend their time and money differently than they did five years ago. They’remore intent on immediate gratification and convenience and have a higher focus on self than before. Consider this: US consumers in 2025 report that they have over three hours more of free time aweek, on average, than those in 2019 reported.3But they allocate nearly 90 percent of that time tosolo activities. The biggest increases are in time spent enjoying hobbies or relaxing independently,shopping, performing fitness activities, and being on social media. Comparatively, the share oftime spent with friends, with family, and on in-person cultural activities (such as attending movies,concerts, and the theater) has remained flat—and therefore decreased as a share of total free time. This isn’t to say that consumers intentionally try to maximize their alone time. In many ways, remotework and the acceleration of e-commerce have created additional free time in the week andmade staying connected easier to do from home. To be sure, there are variations across markets:Consumers in China report spending more of their free time with friends or family and even more timeon self-improvement and shopping for pleasure compared with consumers in the United States. Consumers are also using e-commerce and food delivery services at high rates. Over 90 percentof Chinese and US consumers in our survey say that they shopped at an online-only retailer in theprevious month; the same is true for over 80 percent of surveyed consumers in Germany and theUnited Kingdom.4Rates for grocery delivery are also high: Nearly 40 percent of German, UK, andUS consumers surveyed report that they used grocery delivery in the previous week.5Over one-thirdof consumers across all four