Like me, you probably have seen many headlines citing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people in various demographic segments. Take, for example, age:
- "COVID-19 hurts working mothers"
- "Millenials slammed by second financial crisis"
- "COVID pushes out women and boomers"
- "Pandemic accelerates retirements"
As you can see from these headlines, no generation is unscathed.
How did people of different ages behave during COVID? Preliminary data from the 2020 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice appear to show that in 2020, millennials increased their uptake of new payments habits while boomers were slower to do so.
- Millennials increased their share of online purchases as a percentage of all purchases by a greater margin than boomers. Boomers’ share of purchases online went from 4 percent in 2019 to 6 percent in 2020. For millennials, online purchases jumped to 21 percent from 13 percent.
- Millennials continued to expand their enthusiastic reception of payment apps, including Venmo and Zelle.
Of course, many factors, not just COVID, are in play here. These could be a few:
- Millennials are moving into their prime earning years. For example, they became more likely to have a credit card in 2020. Two-thirds of millennials had a credit card in 2019, and almost 8 in 10 did in 2020.
- Boomers may be stuck in their habits. Payments choice, like many other consumer behaviors, is a habit and generally slow to change.
You can examine differences in consumer behavior by age using the interactive charts for the 2020 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice at atlantafed.org.
By Claire Greene, a payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed