We want to experience something (other than reorganizing more stuff)

While the crux of the matter here on Consumer Corner is, well, usually consumption, we have historically also considered non-consumption through the lens of human (and sometimes squirrels’) behavior (Widmar, 2025a). We explored minimalism and the desire to declutter in 2020, when you were face-to-face with your clutter for weeks on end (Widmar et al, 2021). Add to that our seemingly collective desire to either “spark joy” or toss, Marie Kondo-style.

After all, as one economist (me) once said:

“Changes in consuming, shopping, saving, reusing, keeping and hoarding can all be folded into what is commonly called consumer behavior. Although, upon reflection, it might be more accurate to relabel these actions as ‘changes in household economics decision making’ or ‘changes in home economics’, as not all changes are surrounding consumption — in fact, some are aptly devoted to the lack thereof.”

The reality is that for every decision about what to buy, we have probably made several more, conscious or subconscious, about what not to buy. You see the advertisement and decide that’s cool, but not for you. Or it is cool for you, but you’re saving up for something cooler. Or you really want it but literally cannot pay for it. Or you employ decision-making logic: you think about the pros of this new black shirt but determine you already have a black shirt (or five) and don’t need another one (or at least not that exact one today).

There’s a fair amount of decision-making in what not to purchase; we are, after all, optimizing our own utility subject to a budget constraint. If we spend our money on this, then we cannot spend it on something else. One could make the same arguments about how we spend our time, but the use of time to determine how to use our time is a decision-making black hole we will not peer into today. 

Resource allocation of money to buy something is just one aspect of owning “stuff.” We use money to buy it (whatever it is) in the first place. But then we also need to use resources of time, money, and potentially our own labor to then store, organize, lose and then find again, maintain, and repair said thing. Of particular interest – and ripe for example-making – is the purchasing of items that then require a building in which to store them. Think boats, vehicles that cannot stay outdoors, machinery, and any number of items that require not just money to buy but perhaps climate-controlled storage units  to maintain them. (Exhibit A: pleasure boats. Enough said.)

And that’s just the basics of buying and keeping an item. Add in the time, money, and energy spent researching which one to buy, driving around to see variations in retail stores,  buying, returning, buying again, arguing about shipping damages, and so on. 

The true cost of stuff became obvious in 2020, when you were at home and moving said stuff around in an effort to rearrange what likely amounted to too many things for the size of the container. Also known as: you had way too much stuff to begin with. This realization, regardless of when you had it, helped launch renewed interest in experiences over things. We talked about spending our own money on experiences rather than more stuff. We also started to talk about gifting experiences and memories of those experiences, rather than gifting physical things. And nowhere was this more popular in social-circle conversations than among parents groups; why do babies come with so much plastic? (Widmar et al, 2025b).

Is our societal interest in doing stuff instead of accumulating stuff new? Or are we just more in tune with our piles of belongings after spending a few months (okay, years) in closer proximity to them over the past five years? We have delved into Google Trends web search data in the past here on Consumer Corner to learn about searches for Black Friday versus Cyber Monday shopping, and the fact that we humans seem to search for the start pumpkin-spice-everything season at precisely the same time (Widmar et al, 2025c; Widmar et al, 2025d). 

Recall that Google search data are presented as “interest over time.” Specifically, numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data. Now, let’s look at our collective searching behavior related to the giving of experiences.

When we examine how often people have searched for “give experiences” since 2010, it is clear that this concept has gained steam in the relatively recent past.

Interest increases steadily from 2010 onward, but with more rapidly in the later years in the series. The average monthly search interest from January 2010 through December 2019 was 9. In contrast, the monthly average from January 2020 through July 2025 was 43. Looking at annual averages through 2024, the increases are obvious – particularly the rapid growth post-2020, even though interest was already rising prior to that point.

Table 1: Google Trends web search data for “experiences to give as gifts” and “give experiences” showing annual averages from 2010 through 2024

If one focuses specificially on giving, the rise in interest persists, but within year variation becomes much more pronounced in the fourth quarter ahead of the winter holiday season. Looking at a single year – for example, 2021 – the search interest in “experiences to give as gifts” is focused almost entirely on the winter holiday shopping season.

Table 2: Search Interest Index for “experiences to give as gifts” in 2021

Note that this table indexes search interest against itself, so a value near 99 indicates the highest level of searches over the period of observation. The observations depicted are indexed against the broader timeline of data from 2010-2024.

If we focus on the period from January 2021 through today, we can gain an appreciation for just how specific – and consistent, year after year – these searches are ahead of the holiday season.

Are we really interested in giving experiences, or are we simply gifting them instead of physical items? Interest in giving experiences has increased overall, but zooming in on searches since 2021 provides within-year clarity – and we are reasonably consistent in our patterns. Searches for “give experiences” appear early in the year, taper off by late summer, and then spike in November and December before falling rapidly right at Christmas.

We are increasingly searching for experience-based gifts, and we are doing so at precisely the times when we are collectively searching for the “perfect” gift. This makes sense and perhaps answers the cries of many parents (I propose) who ask for experiences for their children rather than things during the holidays. 

Consumers consume on a predictable schedule, so it follows that they search for experiences to consume on that same schedule. Yet there is a small part of me that cannot help but question this. We talk (collectively) about having less stuff, consuming less, and consuming more consciously, and yet even our alternatives to consuming are predictable, searchable, discussable, and plan-worthy. Recall our discussion about buying the “thing” is only the beginning. Well, doing the thing (experiencing the experience) is not without planning, searching, and coordination either. There’s no free lunch, it turns out. A fun outing ends when you get home, whereas a boat requires your constant attention, housing, and will eventually require your attention again when you try to sell it. A trip to the park does sound simpler than that.

#Tradeoffs