Gen Z Lives Rewarded With Fetch: Unlocking Consumer Insights From America’s Rewards App

As Gen Z navigates the consumer world, their early experiences with brands can leave a lasting impression, particularly when they are intertwined with positive memories. These formative brand experiences can come in many forms – the fast-food restaurant that became a family tradition, the first razor brand used when learning to shave, the chocolate bar that grandparents always gifted for special occasions.

Fetch, America’s Rewards App, is the go-to platform for Gen Z consumers who want to live rewarded. More than a third of the app’s 11.5 million monthly active users is under age 27, making Fetch the most popular rewards app for younger generations. By offering personalized rewards and experiences, Fetch connects with Gen Z on their terms, delivering meaningful engagement and creating lifelong consumer relationships.

How does Gen Z shop?

As Gen Z’s favorite rewards app, Fetch has unparalleled insight into how younger consumers shop, dine and treat themselves.

To demystify the generation that every brand wants to understand, we ran a comprehensive analysis of receipts from 4.4 million Fetch users who entered a birth year of 1997 and earlier, collected from March 1, 2023, through the end of February 2024. This robust dataset provides a detailed view of Gen Z’s shopping behaviors, preferences, and trends.

Gen Z is rapidly becoming an economic force with significant spending power – and unique consumer habits and preferences.

Digging in to aggregate receipt data, Fetch found that Gen Z spends less overall than other demographics, and they shop less frequently.

The also prefer to shop late at night, with peak activity at 10 p.m., and they do their shopping on the weekends. This pattern underscores the non-traditional schedules and lifestyle-driven shopping habits of younger consumers.

Although digital natives, Gen Z is actually less likely to shop online compared to Millennials and Gen X.

They also get delivery less frequently than Millennials (the demographic that orders the most).

Gen Z seeks out value and convenience. Compared to other generations, they’re more likely to shop at mass-market retailers like Target and Walmart, and they’re more likely to dine at fast food restaurants. On the flip side, they’re less likely to shop at regular grocery stores, club stores, dollar stores, drug/convenience stores. And they’re MUCH less likely to shop at liquor stores.

The purchasing patterns of Gen Z reveal a demographic that prioritizes personal care and entertainment. And while they often seek out value, they’re less likely to buy private-label goods – Gen Z purchases at the lowest percentage compared to other generations (6.87% of items vs 9.70%).

Younger consumers are overwhelmingly more likely to spend on beauty products and self care compared to older generations, and they’re spending across the whole spectrum of product offerings – skin care, hair care, lip care, nail care and shave care all stand out independently as top categories.

Digging deeper into specific brands, Gen Z over indexes significantly when it comes to spending on emergency contraception (Plan B One-Step®, Take Action Emergency Contraceptive) and condoms. And although it’s further down the list, they also over-index on baby-care products.

Personal care items are well represented, with Gen Z consumers favoring affordable skincare brands (Naturium, Versed and Peach Slices) and investing in teeth-whitening kits (ARC).

Interestingly, younger consumers seem more likely to buy physical books and camera equipment – Simon & Schuster and Fujifilm are among their top brands.

Get in Touch with Fetch for Business

Are you ready to transform your brand’s consumer engagement and drive growth like never before? Discover how Fetch’s industry-leading approach to precision and personalization combines with the power of Fetch Points to create lifelong consumer relationships. Contact Fetch to learn more.