The holiday season can bump up expenses—It’s that time of the year where everyone goes over their spending cycle to go shopping or to travel to far away places. This makes Christmas and New Year celebrations a crisis for millennials who have demanding spending habits and purchasing preferences. Because of their differences from the previous generations, a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Marist, revealed that young adults or people under 30 prefer to use credits, Bitcoin, and other crypto coins over cash to purchase gifts and other commodities.
Crypto And Credit Over Cash
How is the Millennial generation different from the previous ones in terms of spending habits and purchasing power? These can be measured through the things they buy online and offline, their means to acquire them, and their influence over other probable consumers.
According to the poll, Millennials prefer credit cards and cryptocurrencies because of their convenience, regardless of digital threats like fraud, identity theft, phishing scams, and spam. Millennials are fond of the properties of crypto as it offers the exact opposite of cash—it’s decentralized and anonymous so they can buy whatever they want without distractions or explanations involving third-party institutions. The same goes for credit cards which can easily be used on online stores, except that they are being handled by banks and financial institutions.
From the breakdown of the survey, there are 1,075 U.S adults representing the sample population which contains different age groups. People from groups of 60+, 45-59, and 30-44 prefer cash over credit cards and cryptocurrencies. On the other side, people from the age group 18-29 prefer credit cards and crypto over cash.
The sample population from the survey highlighted adults below 30 years of age, the only age group during holidays that prefer to pay for everything with credit cards and cryptocurrencies. In estimation, these millennials have the highest purchasing power in the United States, so the 60 percent of their sample population who uses mostly credit cards and crypto to buy gifts holds a massive influence than the older age groups who use mostly cash.
Supporting the representation of millennials from the sample population, Barbara Carvalho, director of The Marist Poll at the Marist Institute for Public Opinion and one of the researchers in the survey, stated: “Cash is not a medium for the digital marketplace — you can’t shop that way online”.
