Amazon CEO: Consumers Are Trying to Stretch Dollars

Amazon is reportedly finding that shoppers are looking for deals, especially on big-ticket items.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, the firm saw that people care about getting a bargain on items that are expensive and discretionary, like televisions and computers, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Nov. 30).

“Consumers are spending, but they’re being careful about trying to stretch their dollar,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Wednesday at the New York Times DealBook conference, according to the report.

Amazon is still unsure of how consumers will respond to today’s challenging macroeconomic environment but has lifted its expectations for the holiday shopping season after initially predicting that it would be dampened by inflation and rising interest rates, the report said.

As PYMNTS reported Wednesday, Amazon said this year’s Thanksgiving shopping weekend was its largest ever, with customers purchasing “hundreds of millions of products” without providing any further details.

The company did say that some of the best sellers were tech items — including Amazon’s own Echo Dot and Fire Stick, as well as Apple’s AirPods and the Nintendo Switch — and that small business sellers brought in $1 billion during the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.

At the same time, PYMNTS research has found that 15 million Americans who shopped for gifts in 2021 wouldn’t be doing so this year because inflation is eroding their personal buying power.

In all, 79% of respondents to a survey said they would shop for the 2022 holiday season, marking a nearly nine percentage point drop from the 88% who shopped last year, according to the latest “New Reality Check: The Paycheck-To-Paycheck Report: The Holiday Shopping Edition,” a PYMNTS and LendingClub collaboration.

“Credit card debt is at an all-time high. Credit card rates are reaching all-time highs,” LendingClub Financial Health Officer Anuj Nayar told PYMNTS in an interview posted Nov. 21.