Consumers can be a finicky bunch. And every quarter, executives at publicly listed companies must find ways to deliver coherent narratives about what they are doing and why.
Lately, as consumer confidence has softened, company leaders have been attributing middling prospects to shoppers’ “choiceful” outlook.
The framing is the latest spin that executives are adopting to justify lackluster shopping, said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester. “Choiceful is coded language for: Sales or units are down,” she said, meaning consumers are either spending less at retailers or purchasing a smaller overall volume of products.
“Choiceful,” a term that started becoming popular among executives a few years ago, has become even more ubiquitous in recent months. It was mentioned 70 times across 43 earnings calls in 2025, according to a FactSet analysis of S&P 1500 earnings calls. That was up from 36 mentions in 2024 and 27 in 2023.
Last May, for example, Rick Gomez, the chief commercial officer of Target, said that “consumers have been choiceful in their buying decisions.” In November, he used the term again, saying that “guests are choiceful, stretching budgets and prioritizing value.” Tony Spring, the chief executive of Macy’s, discussed “the reality of a more choiceful consumer” on the company’s earnings call in December, using the term four times during the call. Executives at Mastercard, Walmart and Costco have used the term in recent years, too.
Before that, executives uttered the term only occasionally and not always in the context of consumer behavior. A media executive used it in a 2011 comment to The New York Times in relation to ad buying, and a Sears executive used it in a 2003 interview with The Times to refer to the company’s approach to sponsored entertainment.
The first known use dates to long before the time of corporate earnings calls and media buys: Edmund Spenser used it in an epic poem in 1591, writing, “His choicefull sense with euerie change doth flit.”
But in the past few years, “choiceful” arose in tandem with a new dynamic, Ms. Kodali said: As corporations fighting to maintain their pricing power charged more for their products, consumers started buying fewer overall units. In other words, shoppers were often spending the same — or more — while purchasing less stuff. This has not been the end of the world for retailers (many have seen profits rise even as total unit sales decline), but it does prompt a need to explain.
“Even when you’re doing well, you still have to manage investors,” Ms. Kodali said. “When you’re a public company executive, you’re always scrambling, always looking to justify.”
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