“It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to fill the little bag.”. The phrase is repeated in different homes, neighborhoods and everyday conversations. It is no longer just about buying less: the economic deterioration has modified the way in which thousands of Argentine families think, organize and experience consumption.
A qualitative study conducted by youuniversal, consultancy specialized in research and trends together with the Prójimo agency, analyzed how the urban popular sectors consume today and what strategies they develop to maintain a certain normality in a context of permanent adjustment.
The study focused on the C3 and D1/DE segments, lower and lower middle-income households, to understand how consumption changes when the economic margin disappears. The phenomenon does not only speak of economic restriction. It talks about how priorities are reorganized, how the relationship with brands changes and how class identity is transformed when sustaining consumption becomes increasingly difficult.
According to the survey, in March 2026, C3 households cut an average of 5.5 consumption categories, while in D1 the figure amounts to 6.35 categories. Only 6% of D1 households claim to have not reduced any expenses, and in C3 that percentage barely reaches 13%. The main cuts are concentrated in clothing and footwear, non-essential foods, outings and leisure, and personal and home care products. Even consumption considered basic for everyday entertainment, such as streaming platforms, show significant drops in the lowest sectors.
One of the central observations of the study is that economic deterioration also impacts people’s emotional state. While in the D1 sectors negativity appears associated with the objective difficulty of making ends meet, in C3 the discomfort is more linked to aspirational frustration: the feeling of having lost closeness to the idea of the middle class.
“It is not just an adjustment. In many cases, the perception of social decline appears. The decline is not measured only in income, but in everything that people feel they have stopped being able to support,” explains Gonzalo Vidal Meyrelles, founder of Prójimo.
The main finding is forceful: consumption decisions were no longer guided by desire or aspiration and began to be organized around daily survival. People no longer go shopping thinking about what they want. He goes in thinking what he can hold. An extreme administration logic appears, where even basic products begin to be perceived as a luxury.
Consumption stops being aspirational and becomes tactical: 39% declare that they are more attentive to promotions and discounts, 37% buy only what they need for the day, 35% prioritize second brands and 31% buy more from wholesalers. In C3, the testing of new brands and the purchase of smaller containers increases to better manage spending, while in D1 a defensive logic focused on maintaining the basics predominates.
One of the most visible changes appears in diet. Beef, historically associated with well-being and Argentine family life, stops occupying an everyday place and is replaced by cheaper alternatives.
For many families, meat consumption no longer functions solely as food, but as an emotional measure of lost well-being.
The brands. Another profound transformation is the disappearance of brand loyalty. The choice is no longer about personal preferences but about finding the cheapest possible. According to the study, the deterioration of purchasing power produced increasingly pragmatic and defensive consumption, where basic household categories are managed with extreme precision. One of the most significant findings appears in cleaning and personal care strategies. Faced with rising prices, many families are replacing liquid products with bar soap, diluting detergents and developing household techniques to prolong the useful life of clothing. For researchers, this behavior reflects a profound cultural change: the effort is no longer put into consuming more, but rather into preserving the little one has.
The study also detects a growing phenomenon: adolescents and young people who begin to generate income from an early age to cover their own expenses. Clothing sales, neighborhood fairs, resales and trades appear as common ways to complement increasingly stressed family economies. “The crisis accelerates adulthood processes. Many kids start working not as an experience or learning, but as a concrete need to sustain basic consumption,” says the founder of Prójimo.
Beyond the numbers. The report shows strong emotional exhaustion. Expressions such as “we have to endure it”, “the storm will pass” or even “2001 was easier than this” appear repeatedly in the interviews. Consumption works as an emotional thermometer of a society. What we see today is not just a drop in purchasing power: it is wear and tear, resignation and loss of horizon.
From Prójimo they emphasize that these changes directly impact the daily lives of families and reinforce the need to build networks of support and social support in contexts of increasing vulnerability. Because on the margins not only is the crisis expressed: new forms of adaptation, consumption and survival also appear first. In this vision, understanding current Argentina necessarily implies putting the periphery at the center.
* Co-founder and CEO of Youniversal.
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by Ximena Díaz Alarcón
