Why Consumers Are Cutting Back on Shopping and Embracing No Buy 2025

Cassandra Orakpo had enough.Too much, in fact.Shopping on her phone had become so easy it had turned into a bad habit.

She bought a cake decorating kit, thinking she’d make her own birthday cake, and never even took it out of the box.She has at least 80 bottles of perfume stored in her closet.

And despite all the clothes she has purchased, she feels she has nothing to wear.“Clearly my buying has gotten to a place where it’s bordering on hoarding,” Ms.Orakpo said.So toward the end of last year, Ms.

Orakpo, who is 31 and lives in Houston, pledged to tame her buying habits.The first step was to scrub her accounts: She unsubscribed from daily emails from Shein; she changed her TikTok settings to avoid personalized ads; she blocked Temu on X.

She also opted out of texts from brands like Fashion Nova, her nail salon and even her local bubble tea shop.And then she told her more than 2,500 followers on TikTok about it.Ms.Orakpo joined a growing group of shoppers who are fed up with a constant barrage of marketing in their social feeds and phone alerts.

Many have taken to TikTok — the site of much of their frustration — to declare that they are participating in “Low Buy 2025” or “No Buy 2025” and sharing the ways they are curbing their spending.Some “shop their closet,” and others pledge to make sure their containers of blush hit pan before being enticed into buying a new one.

The videos have garnered millions of views since the start of the year.The zeal that is driving this trend is as much a pushback against the forces of a consumerist culture as it is about saving money, with scorn for corporate manipulation mixed in with tips for changing personal habits.On the scorn end of the spectrum is a call for an “economic blackout” on Friday by the People’s Union USA, which says it is fighting “an economy designed to exploit workers, suppress wages and keep the majority of us in a constant state of struggle.” The group is asking people no...