American Families have Cut their Bills for Clothes and Shoes by nearly Two-Thirds in 50 Years

The Numbers: Average purchases per person -

2021: 69 garments, 7.4 pairs of shoes; 2.6% of family budgets

2000: 66 garments, 6.6 pairs of shoes; 4.9% of family budgets

1991: 40 garments, 5.4 pairs of shoes; 5.9% of family

1972/3: 28 garments, shoes n/a (3 to 4 pairs?); 7.8% of family budgets

* Purchasing totals from American Apparel & Footwear Association; budget share from BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. As noted below, the 1972/3 survey (like other pre-1991 Consumer Expenditure surveys) was a two-year composite.

What They Mean:

A look at affluence through a couple of shopping stats:

(1) According to the American Apparel & Footwear Association, American families bought 69 garments and 7.4 pairs of shoes in 2021. And

(2) the Bureau of Labor Statistics “Consumer Expenditure Survey” (“CEX”), which has tracked spending on these items for 121 years, reports that in that year the average family spent $1,754 on this wardrobe upgrade, which was about 2.6% of their year’s total $66,928 budget.

To scroll back through a half-century of CEX archives* is to see, as time passes, these life necessities taking up steadily smaller shares of family spending as the vanished exotic world of the early 1970s (black-and-white TV, AM radio, phone booths, energy crises, smoky air) evolved into 2020s America. Changes in logistics, retail practices, and trade policy (computer networks, on-line shopping, and big-box stores; goods carried in slow and small break-bulk shipping rather than large-scale container lines; emergence of large light-manufacturing industries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa; elimination of a complex clothing import-quota system and some tariff-cutting mainly in luxury goods) mean that annual clothing and shoe spending in dollar terms has barely changed even as incomes rose, inflation nibbled at dollar value, and mall trawls and on-line shopping binges returned larger and larger sacks of shirts, shoes, socks, brassieres, etc. The figures look like this:

2021: 2.6% of family budget ($1,754 of $66,298)

2011: 3.5% of family budget ($1,740 of $49,705)

2006: 3.9% of family budget ($1,835 of $48,398)

2001: 4.4% of family budget ($1,743 of $39,518)

1991: 5.9% of family budget ($1,735 of $29,614)

1984/5: 6.0% of family budget ($1,319 of $21,975)

1972/3: 6.8% of family budget ($565 of $8,270)

* The 1972/1973 and 1984/1985 editions are two-year surveys. Regular annual CEX’s begin in the late 1980s.

Thus Americans (a) buy about twice as many garments and pairs of shoes as their grandparents did 50 years ago but (b) have cut their budgets for these products by almost two thirds. This is the equivalent of shifting about 4.2% of family spending in 2021 –$2,800, the equivalent of two weeks’ worth of income — away from necessities and toward savings, education, entertainment, and so on. On a shorter scale since 2001, the shift is about 1.8% of spending, or about $1,200.

The families most in need of help — single parents — see slightly larger benefits from this evolution than wealthier households. The CEX reports show that in 2021 the 9 million single-parent families spent an average of $49,811 to spend, with $2,254 or 4.5% of the family budget** used for shoes and clothes. These figures don’t go back quite as far as whole-family reports, but the comparable single-parent figure was $1,763, or 8.1% of a $21,653 budget, on shoes and clothes; thus single parents have been able to re-purpose about 3.6% of their budget.