I know a woman who cancelled her gym membership to save money and then spent the saving on a nine pound jar of chilli crisp from a brand she found on TikTok. She wasn’t being reckless. She was being completely rational, by the rules of a game most of us are now playing without realising we agreed to it.
Ask anyone under thirty why money feels tight and they will give you the honest list. Rent. Wages that haven’t moved in a decade. A housing ladder someone pulled up before they got a foot on it. Then look in their basket and you will find a candle that costs more than a week of bus fares, a skincare serum in a bottle designed to photograph well, and a Deliveroo order for a meal they could have made at home for a third of the price. We are told this generation is broke and reckless in the same breath, as if those two things don’t have a relationship. They do. The spending isn’t the contradiction. It’s the coping mechanism.
I’ve started calling this Treat Culture in client meetings, mostly because I needed a word for something I kept seeing in brief after brief and couldn’t name properly. It’s the elevation of the small indulgence into a daily necessity. Not a holiday, not a car, not anything that requires saving up. Just a steady drip of little permissions to feel good, dressed up as self care, documented as content, and defended as an inalienable right the moment anyone questions it. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it in your own basket either. I bought a forty pound candle last month and told myself it was an investment in my workspace. It was not an investment. It was a treat, and I needed the story to feel okay about it.
Objects: the rise of the little luxury
The first place Treat Culture shows up is in what we buy, and specifically in what we buy instead of the big thing we’ve quietly given up on. Economists have a name for this that predates TikTok by about eighty years, the lipstick effect, the idea that in hard times people cut the expensive purchases and increase spending on small affordable indulgences. It showed up after the financial crash, when women aged eighteen to forty were found to be spending more on makeup while cutting back everywhere else. It showed up again through the 2016 to 2020 period, when LVMH’s little luxuries category grew almost twice as fast as the rest of the company, up 9.7 percent in a single year, while the wider economy gave people fewer and fewer reasons for optimism.
What’s different now is the scale and the visibility. In the UK, premium own label supermarket products are up 14.6 percent, which tells you people aren’t trading down on everything, they’re trading down selectively so they can keep affording the bits that make them feel like they haven’t lost anything. Gen Z spends nearly double the UK average on eating out, at 16 percent of income, and now accounts for a fifth of global luxury sales, growing three times faster than any older generation. Read that against a December 2024 study of over fifteen thousand consumers, which found that every generation plans to cut discretionary spending in 2025 except one. Gen Z intend to spend more.
That isn’t financial illiteracy. It’s a generation doing the maths on a future that keeps refusing to show up and deciding the return on a nine pound candle today beats the return on a pension they may never get to use. I don’t love saying that as someone who runs a business built partly on selling people things they don’t strictly need. But I’d rather say it than pretend I don’t see it happening in my own spending.
