With economic anxiety reaching a 15-year high, affordability is a clear and present danger for brands and consumers alike.

But in a K-shaped economy, the top 10% of earners in the U.S. are generally thought to be doing just fine as they keep the overall economy afloat with their ever-greater share of consumer spending. Meanwhile, the rest of the country lives in a different economy altogether and struggles to make ends meet.

We wanted to test that assumption by looking at how Americans across income levels have responded to the economic ups and downs of the last 10 or so years. And it turns out that the K-shaped economic narrative has some truth to it: Americans with incomes of $200k+ (who represent ~8% of the total U.S. MONITOR sample, so not quite the top income decile but close enough for our purposes) do indeed look different than everyone else, even including so-called mass affluent or upper-middle class consumers making seemingly comfortable incomes.

In every income bracket, the trend of value-seeking shopping behavior accelerated through the pandemic and the 2022 inflationary spike. In those most volatile of times, wealthier consumers did engage in trading down. They did look for deals and they did alter their shopping behavior—for a time. But after inflationary pressures peaked, there was a return largely back to the baseline.

Meanwhile, for everyone else, these behaviors went up and stayed up even as inflationary pressures eased.