Usage of the flexible payment method hit an all-time high on Cyber Monday, driving $1.03 billion in online spend (up 4.2% YoY), as consumers looked for greater flexibility in managing their holiday budgets. The vast majority of BNPL transactions are happening on a mobile device as well, at 79.4% share on Cyber Monday (vs. desktop). In an Adobe survey of over 1,000 U.S. consumers (conducted Nov. 2025), respondents said they were most likely to use BNPL for electronics, apparel, toys, and furniture purchases.
Source: Adobe Analytics.
I’ve legit wondered about this and one of the many reasons I don’t want kids is I don’t think it’d be fair to inflict my lifestyle on them, no matter how morally correct I feel.
My basic thought though is that as long as social media is the dominant means by which cultural trends are spread and amplified, anti-consumerism will be hard to spread.
Once modern social media became dominant, social justice pivoted from our own sins (wearing slave made clothes, children losing limbs for our new phones etc) and switched to dunking on public figures and large systemic forces. I think that’s because it’s much easier to share, make jokes about etc evils that you are not currently doing. That is to say, it’s a lot easier to make memes about say, OscarsSoWhite when none of us are in the Academy than say, “my shoes are made by kids who occasionally burn to death” while many folks are wearing those types of shoes.