Even as toymakers are hoping for sales to pick up in the last few days before the holiday, there is an alarming trend that may not impact 2025 sales but is likely to hit 2026 and beyond.
Data from the finance company TransUnion and the 2025 Season of Spending report from personal finance site Achieve, indicate that credit card use—unsecured debt—is on the rise this year, even as consumers also say that are planning on spending less, minimize travel, and take on less debt for their holiday celebrations.
As the holiday shopping season comes to an end and market basket prices are up across the board, maintaining that sense of magic at the holidays is costing consumers. Combined with uncertainty caused by the government shutdown, based on in-person interviews and online questions by The Toy Guy, purses have been staying closed as well, at least through the first week of December.
Reporting from Lending Tree suggests that by late 2025 U.S. consumers are holding the largest aggregate credit-card balances on record while showing only modest signs of distress: total outstanding card debt sits above $1.2 trillion, reaching new highs as revolving balances grew through the year.
The Federal Reserve of St. Louis adds that delinquency and charge-off indicators tell a mixed but not yet alarming story. Bank-reported delinquency rates have eased slightly from mid-2024 peaks and have largely flattened through 2025, suggesting consumers are juggling balances rather than defaulting en masse. At the same time, some charge-off metrics remain historically elevated compared with pre-pandemic norms — a reminder that higher interest rates and stretched budgets leave less margin for error.
Spending behavior is bifurcated. Higher-income, rewards-focused cardholders (think travel and premium cards) have continued to spend robustly, supporting networks like AmEx over holiday weeks, while lower- and middle-income households increasingly rely on credit for day-to-day and discretionary purchases as inflation and housing costs bite. Revolving credit growth outpaced nonrevolving credit in several monthly releases, consistent with heavier card usage.
In the last weeks of 2025, what we’re seeing is that consumers using cards more and carrying record balances. What that means for 2026 is that the early part of the year at least will largely be a test of whether incomes, jobs, inflation, and rates align so consumers can service that debt and still have discretionary income to spend on items like toys.
While we don’t know yet how this will all play out, the risk is always that carrying too much debt will suppress consumer spending and could potentially be a drag on the entire industry as well.
