Consumers Are Cutting Back on Snacks, Fights and Even Laundry.美消費者正減少吃零食、搭機甚至洗衣

Dimanche 11 mai 2025 

Consumers, worried about the economy, are pulling back on their spending, and that anxiety is translating into lower sales and profits for some of the country's largest consumer-oriented companies.

On Thursday, PepsiCo Inc. cut its full-year guidance outlook, citing a reduction in consumer spending as well as the impact the beverage and snacks company is feeling from increased global tariffs.

"Relative to where we were three months ago, we probably aren't feeling as good about the consumer now, " Jamie Caulfield, chief financial officer of PepsiCo, told Wall Street analysts and investors on an earnings call Thursday morning.

The company, which manufactures Pepsi and Gatorade drinks as well as popular snacks such as Doritos and Cheetos, cut its profit forecast for the full year to flat from its earlier guidance that expected earnings growth to be in the mid-single digits. It reported a decline of 1.8% in revenue, to $17.9 billion, for the quarter ending March 22, and a drop of 10% in net income, to $1.8 billion, from the same period a year ago.

Comments made on PepsiCo's earnings call echoed what executives at other consumer companies have said in recent days about how apprehension in the global economy was key to consumers spending less. The pullback has started to weigh on some companies' revenues and dampen their outlook for the coming months.

At Chipotle, same-store sales fell for the first time since 2020 in the most recent quarter, the chain reported this week. Uncertainty about the path forward for the U.S. economy started to affect spending in February, the company said, shortly after President Donald Trump's inauguration--a trend that continued into this month.

"It was all around this idea of saving money. economic uncertainty --they're eating at home more frequently than they're out, " said Scott Boatwright, the burrito chain's CEO.

Another signal of distress among shoppers: Consumers are doing less laundry to scale back on detergent purchases, an executive from Procter & Gamble, which makes household staples such as Tide detergent, told Yahoo Finance.

On Thursday, P&G cut its full-year outlook and said whiplash on tariffs policy had factored into a "pause" in consumption as consumers tried to make sense of stock market volatility and job market uncertainty, said Andre Schulten, the company's chief financial officer.