Russians Began To Save Massively On Food And Clothing
- 10.09.2025, 20:09
Purchasing power is falling.
Russian citizens are saving more and more on basic everyday necessities due to the rapid rise in prices, which, even according to official Rosstat data, has reached 40% since the beginning of the war, reports The Moscow Times.
The number of clothing purchases in January-August 2025 has fallen by 8%, Kommersant reports, citing data from the OFD Platform. Due to the decline in demand, according to the Union of Shopping Centers, large fashion retailers will be forced to "optimize" up to 40% of retail space.
To save money on food, consumers are increasingly visiting hard discounters, which sell the cheapest goods with maximum discounts. The revenue of such stores ("Svetofor", "Chizhik", "Dobrotsen") grew by 27% year-on-year - a record among all food retailers, according to Infoline statistics.
The continued growth in the attractiveness of this format is influenced by the savings behavior of consumers, which has intensified over the past year under the influence of the high key rate, explains the general director of "Infoline-Analytics" Mikhail Burmistrov.
The use of discounts and promotions has become the most popular form of savings - it is used by 68% of consumers, according to a study by Romir. 58% consciously refuse certain goods that they bought before, 57% try to find analogues in lower price categories, and almost half (49%) choose low-price stores for shopping.
"To minimize spending on food and essential goods, 46% of Russians practice reducing the frequency of trips to stores," Romir writes.
Savings have even started to be made even by well-off people - with income from 150 thousand rubles per month per family member, the research of B1 Group of Companies has shown: now every second of them limits himself in spontaneous purchases, although only six months ago there were only 22% of such people.
The demand for equipment and electronics has collapsed this year at a record level for 30 years, Dmitry Alexeev, co-owner and director of DNS Group of Companies, told RBC. According to him, this year sales have decreased nominally in rubles, which was not the case before. "We had periods when the market could fall in pieces, in dollars, but in rubles, without taking into account even inflation, it has never fallen", - said Alexeev.
Although Rosstat reports on the growth of income and real wages, the real purchasing power of people is falling, says the co-chairman of "Business Russia" in the Moscow region Roman Kharlanov.
"We now see that Russians minimize spending in every possible way: they buy only goods with discounts or promotions, postpone large purchases (even in the food segment, for example, stocks for winter)," says Anna Vedeneeva, founder of Vedeneeva Consulting Group. She believes that the current decline in sales is not a short-term crisis, but a structural shift in the behavior of consumers, most of whom expect further price increases.
"These expectations have become a self-fulfilling forecast: the more people believe in the worsening of the situation, the more actively they change their behavior, exacerbating the crisis," says Vedeneeva.