Rather than seeing consumers merely as "more frugal," the pattern is more useful when read through four forms of response:
1. Protect: spending that is hard to eliminate
Daily necessities and functional spending have a relatively high threshold for postponement.
Food, utilities, transportation, and vehicle maintenance may still be adjusted, but the underlying need is not easily removed from the budget.
2. Preserve: small spending still considered worthwhile
Some categories are kept because the benefit or satisfaction they provide is still considered worth the amount spent.
Beauty, personal care, dining out, or certain forms of entertainment can fall into this space. What changes is not always the category, but how much consumers are willing to pay and how often they buy.
3. Postpone: purchases that can wait
Gadgets, electronics, durable goods, and some discretionary purchases have greater room for postponement.
The problem for brands in these categories is not always a disappearing need, but an extended purchase cycle.
4. Trade down: still buying, but with compromises
Consumers can also stay in a category while lowering the cost per transaction: choosing smaller sizes, more affordable products, basic variants, or alternative brands.
This matters because a decline in transaction value does not always mean a loss of consumer interest in the category.
Thus, "consumer slowdown" does not always mean one thing. Brands need to distinguish whether they are facing lost demand, postponed demand, reduced frequency, or consumers trading down.
Not All Spending Is Being Cut
In the same Bank Indonesia table, spare parts and accessories kept growing at double digits across almost the entire contraction period. Food, beverages, and tobacco fell most deeply to -4.1% in May, then returned to positive 2.4% in July.
The decline was shallower and the recovery faster than in information and communication equipment.
The signal is not that consumers suddenly prioritize one specific category. What is more relevant is that each category has a different postponement threshold.
Functional categories may have purchase reasons that are harder to delay. Conversely, purchases with a high ticket size and a long purchase cycle give consumers more room to wait.
For this reason, it is not enough for brands to look at whether their category is growing or falling. They need to understand what kind of demand pressure is occurring within that category.
Household Budget Space Is Indeed Becoming More Selective
How little room remains is visible from the household side.
BPS data processed by Mandiri Institute, as reported by Kontan, records that the number of middle-class people fell from 47.9 million in 2024 to 46.7 million in 2025, while the aspiring middle class swelled to 142 million people, or 50.4% of the population.
The Katadata Indonesia Middle Class Insight (KIMCI) 2026 research translates this to the wallet level: 40.5% of the middle class's monthly income goes to consumption, and 63.6% of respondents have experienced spending exceeding their income.
Under these conditions, adjustments are most likely to occur in the most flexible layer of spending.
So the question changes.
No longer:
"Have young people stopped shopping?"
But rather:
"When they have to choose, which spending is still considered worth buying now?"
