New York, June 15, 2026, 06:58 (EDT)
- Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan pointed to pet food purchases as a small but telling sign of how households are adjusting to high prices.
- Bank of America Institute’s latest Consumer Checkpoint showed total card spending rose 5.1% year over year in May, its strongest pace in nearly four years.
- Inflation and weak sentiment remain the risk: consumers are still buying, but more carefully.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan says American consumers are not shutting their wallets. They are becoming more selective. In a recent NBC News interview, Moynihan pointed to the pet food aisle as one place where that shift is showing up in the bank’s card data. “You know, higher end pet food is not being charged as much on our credit and debit cards as the next brand down,” Moynihan said, according to a summary of the interview that links back to NBC News. Civic Stream
The point was not that households have stopped spending. Moynihan said consumers were still putting money toward vacations and restaurants, even as they made room for higher everyday costs. That fits with the latest Bank of America Institute Consumer Checkpoint, which said total card spending rose 5.1% year over year in May, the strongest growth in nearly four years, with spending still firm across goods and services rather than driven only by gasoline.
The same report also explains why the word “resilient” needs a little caution. Bank of America Institute said it saw no clear sign that households were leaning heavily on borrowing to support spending, but it also noted that some consumers are making more trips to stores, possibly looking for bargains. In plain terms, shoppers are still active, but the easy-spending mood of the post-pandemic period looks weaker. Bank of America Institute
That tension is showing up in national data too. U.S. consumer sentiment rose to 48.9 in early June from 44.8 in May, according to the University of Michigan survey, helped by easing gasoline prices. But Surveys of Consumers Director Joanne Hsu said views of the economy remained “relatively dour,” with households still focused on inflation and other kitchen-table costs. SCAlable Agent
Inflation is the reason the spending numbers matter so much. Reuters reported that the Consumer Price Index rose 4.2% in the 12 months through May, the fastest pace since April 2023, while inflation outpaced wage growth for a second straight month. That is the squeeze behind Moynihan’s pet food example: Americans may still be buying, eating out and traveling, but many are trading down where they can.
