Introduction
Buying apparel, whether it’s new or secondhand, has always been a necessity. Some do it more often than others, and some less often. There are many reasons why we buy apparel, it can be because of self-expression, the requirements of where we live and work, and many other motives. With more accessible access to E-Commerce and retail stores, buying clothes is as easy as a few clicks away or blocks away. This situation can sometimes lead us to excessive spending on buying apparel pieces we might not need but want. In this research, I will answer the following questions to investigate consumer spending on apparel,
- How much money do we spend on apparel?
- What are the patterns of consumer spending on apparel?
Materials & Methodologies
First, I started by building research questions which can be found in the introduction section. Next, I searched for my questions on Google and saw the most reputable sources I could find. I ended up finding the data on the U.S BLS website. The data is based on the consumer expenditure survey. I chose the data from 2011 – 2021 to see the general pattern for the past ten years. The data later got imported into XLS format and cleaned on Microsoft Excel. The data contained personal income, transportation, housing, alcoholic beverages, and many more attributes. Because my data is solely focused on spending on apparel, I decided to highlight the data point I need. I also combined together the data from 2011 – 2021 in Excel because the data files are separated by years. After that, cleaned data is exported to Tableau, a data visualization software.
Results
To see the if there is an increase or decrease in consumer expenditure, I started by using the quick table calculation in Tableau to see the percent difference from 2011 – 2021. The result shows a significant decrease in 2020 and a tremendous increase in 2021.
At first glance, it was startling to see the number fell by 23.84% in 2020. But, if we recall what happened in 2020, we can hypothesize that people might spend less money on clothing due to the pandemic. In 2021, there was also a massive increase in spending by 22.32%, recovering from what happened in 2020. This number might look enormous in comparison to the other number. However, when we look at the bar chart below, we can see that this number is relatively steady from the previous years, and the year 2020 is only one of the exceptions.
Next, I divided the data into females and males to create a side-by-side chart. The purpose of this chart is to find out if gender plays a role in spending on apparel.
Females almost doubled their annual spending on clothing compared to the opposite gender consistently.
Following the previous insight, to see if the age group might play a role in this spending, I separate the data between females and males above and below 16 years old to see if there are any additional patterns.
Average annual spending on female clothing above 16 is the highest among other categories. Interestingly, for females and males below 16, the difference between the spending is not as significant as for females and males above 16. In 2016 and 2021, males below 16 accounted for more spending than females below 16 by a percent.
Reflection
Our average spending on clothing has been relatively steady for the past ten years. While spending the same amount of money on clothing every year sounds like not a terrible idea, there has been evidence that the fashion industry, particularly fast fashion, has been producing a lot of waste in the process. Clothing stays relatively affordable, but it comes with other costs. According to an article by Bloomberg, fashion accounts for a fifth of the 300 million tons of plastic produced each year globally. And more clothing has been produced than ever since the year 2000. Looking at the charts above, while financially it’s not impacting our life as the spending stays relatively stable, there are other factors that we have to consider when buying clothing. There will be a need to further investigate the number of clothing people has on average, apparel production, and what buying from fast fashion mean for our environment.