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Consumer sentiment just hit a decade low. Consumer spending just had its best month in four years. Only one of those numbers describes what happens next.
In July, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index sat at its lowest level in 10 years. In June, total U.S. card spend grew 6% year over year, the strongest reading in over four years. Same consumers, same summer, two different stories.
AlixPartners has fielded its State of the Consumer survey since 2009, tracking behavior across restaurants, convenience stores, and travel and leisure. The Summer 2026 wave, 1,000 U.S. consumers surveyed July 14 to 16, points to an answer: sentiment stopped predicting behavior months ago, and the pullback consumers describe is no longer the pullback they are making.
The baseline has reset
Household debt hit a record $18.8 trillion in the first quarter, up 32% since 2019 per the Federal Reserve of New York, and personal savings are down 45% since last spring, so every input that normally forces a pullback is in place.
However, our study found that financial anxiety posted its first decline in five years. The share of consumers with no plan to cut back grew for the first time, up 4.5 percentagepoints, and cutbacks eased in five of the seven discretionary categories the survey tracks. Only personal care services and home entertainment rose, so the pullback is rotating rather than disappearing. Consumers did not get less anxious because conditions improved; they got less anxious because bad news stopped being news.
Say versus spend
The gap runs one way in each sector evaluated.
| Sector | What consumers say | What the receipts show |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurants | 41% still cite financial pressure as the reason for cutting back | Full-service comps are climbing across income bands while value-focused limited-service chains grow traffic; the rest are flat or worse despite raising prices |
| Convenience stores | Prepared food is framed as a budget compromise | Foodservice just posted its 23rd consecutive year of growth and now drives 39% of in-store gross profit |
| Travel and leisure | 69% plan to cut back on at least one travel category this year | Hotel RevPAR just posted its best month since March 2023, and loyalty enrollment is outgrowing room supply two to one |
The survey captures the dissonance between how consumers feel about prices and what they are spending money on anyway. They are paying the higher prices anyway because the purchase is perceived to have value.
Sector by sector
Restaurants
Financial-pressure cutbacks eased three points to 41% of consumers, but guests are changing what they order rather than whether they go. Fewer say they are reducing how often they dine out, while more say they are simply choosing less expensive items. One in four would now trade a cheap fast-food meal for a full-service one, which is where the premium-occasion pipeline is coming from: Longhorn Steakhouse and Chili’s, for example, now top the entire same-store-sales growth chart, well ahead of the -0.6% limited service median. Value perception improved the least here of the three sectors surveyed, up just 4.3 net points, even as menu prices keep outpacing inflation and chain locations keep outgrowing the core spending cohort.
Strip out the financial-pressure cutbacks and the remaining pullback is intensifying, not easing. Consumers citing non-financial reasons such as service, ambiance, and speed rose from 68% to 95% since April 2025. Loyalty is losing ground too: 66% of guests now say restaurant loyalty programs barely influence their choice, the first backslide in loyalty in a decade.
Convenience stores
Convenience has stopped being an adjacent channel and become a direct substitute. Roughly 53% of consumers now see c-store prepared food as a genuine alternative to fast food, and foodservice is the profit engine behind that shift, at 29% of in-store sales but 39% of in-store gross profit. Value perception here rose faster than in the other two sectors surveyed, up 13.5 net points year over year, though grocery gained the most of any category at 20.4, led by the same under-45 cohort reshaping restaurant demand (see full report for data).
The channel is not immune to the pressure it is exploiting. Consumers are starting to describe c-store value the way they once described QSR value: eroding. Growth is also uneven by region, with the West still open territory for a foodservice-focused regional operator to expand.
Travel and leisure
Travel shows the clearest version of the say-do gap. Sixty-nine percent of consumers plan to cut back on at least one travel or leisure category in the next year, yet fewer than one in ten cite a non-financial reason such as lost interest or safety concerns; the rest is a price story, not a preference shift. Four in ten consumers have gone into debt to pay for a trip, and one in five are still paying it off, a financing decision more than a deferral.
Operators are already living the gap on their own earnings calls. Hilton calls its recovery “C-shaped,” with middle- and lower-income travelers only now returning even as it raised full-year RevPAR guidance. Royal Caribbean's net yield beat guidance and its 2027 bookings are already pacing ahead, while Norwegian Cruise Line cut guidance and called the miss partly self-inflicted, a split on execution, not demand. Value perception is positive across every travel and leisure category tracked, but the gain sits entirely under age 55.
Where the growth actually lives
Every one of these sector splits shares the same fault line: age. The 25-to-44 cohort reports the highest financial anxiety in the survey and is simultaneously the most protective of the restaurant occasion. They are the only age band with positive restaurant spend intent for next year, and the group driving the shift toward convenience stores as a real fast-food substitute. That cohort is also roughly 10 points more responsive to loyalty programs than the average traveler. The recovery is not broad, but sits squarely in the cohort operators have spent three years trying to win over with discounts.
A simpler possible explanation: the 2026 FIFA World Cup contributed to a strong earnings season, inflating one quarter's numbers. The evidence for this? Restaurant and bar card spend ran 3.8 points ahead of last year in June, inside the tournament window and concentrated in host metros. The real test will come in the third quarter of 2026, once those comparisons roll off. If the no-cutback trend holds, the baseline has shifted. If it reverses, June was a blip camouflaged to look like a recovery.
What operators should do now
Diagnosis is not a plan. The full study sets out five priorities for operators in each sector, starting here:
Restaurant operators
Restaurants have to redefine value and then prove it consistently, which is a different job from discounting. The competitive landscape is shifting faster than most operators are remapping it. And they need to focus on execution to avoid falling victim to non-financial pullback. Marketing follows that work rather than leading it, and cost is what funds the whole exercise without taking it out of the guest experience.
Convenience-store operators
Convenience operators are competing on speed and quality now, and the loyalty window is open only for as long as restaurant programs keep losing their pull. The pressure lands on harder internal decisions: how to defend the core basket, which categories keep their space as food sales grow, and what to do about a labor model built for fuel retail rather than a lunch rush.
Travel and leisure operators
Travel and leisure operators have to defend the trip itself before the pullback deepens, and that starts with rebuilding price trust, since the cutbacks are conditional on price rather than on interest. After that it becomes a targeting problem: telling the guests who are deferring apart from the ones trading down mid-trip, putting loyalty spend where it actually earns a return, and making service consistent enough to be worth rewarding.
Each priority comes with the specific moves behind it, the benchmarks to test against, and the sequencing that separates operators closing the gap from the ones still discounting into it.
The full study breaks down the say-do gap by sector, tests it against operator earnings calls and public data, and sets out what restaurant, convenience-store, and travel operators should do before October settles the question.
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