Revenge spending is real, and it's spectacular

Amarah Hasham-Steele
Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:52:54 +0000
Money

Okay, so 2025 was rough. The US tariffs hit, well, everybody, Canada's sovereignty was suddenly up for debate, and youth unemployment hit record highs. Entry-level jobs were disappearing and a university degree no longer guaranteed a stable career.

It was also the year I finished my master's degree and entered the workforce for the first time. Great timing, right?

I was lucky to find work right out of school (not a given for a lot of my Gen Z peers), but it's a one-year contract, meaning I’ll be back on the job market soon, competing once more for entry-level roles in a market that's still shrinking and isn't getting any easier. Naturally, I’ve been focused on budgeting, trying not to spend on things I don’t need.

But there’s one thing I just can’t stay away from: summer concert tickets. Already, I’ve got tickets to two shows in June, and I’ve been refreshing Ticketmaster, trying to land overpriced resale tickets for a third. After a winter of snow and saving, the idea of standing in a crowd, singing along to songs I've been playing on repeat for months, and not thinking about my bank account at all, feels worth every penny.

Turns out, I'm in good company. A December Globe and Mail article reported that, among RBC card-holders, arts and entertainment spending surged 204% between early 2018 and fall 2025. A good chunk of that is probably ticket prices, as a separate Pollstar report found that average concert ticket prices jumped from around $96 in 2019 to $133 in 2025.

But we’re also spending more on arts and entertainment proportionally; in 2025, TD card holders spent more on entertainment than any other category. This comes as the cost of groceries is up more than 30% since 2019, and Canadian household debt has hit record highs.

Stretched thin on the essentials, but somehow splurging on concerts. Nobody predicted that 2025 would be the year we started spending like everything wasn't on fire. And yet.

Good news: you're not alone. Bad news: there's a reason for that

There’s a name for this baffling behaviour that so many of us have been engaging in: “revenge spending.” Inyoung Park, an assistant professor of communications and IT at Seoul Women’s University in South Korea, told me that revenge spending (sometimes called revenge buying) is “aggressive spending on high-priced or luxury goods following a period of restriction, uncertainty, or emotional suppression.” The term entered the mainstream during COVID, when pent-up demand sent consumers on a post-lockdown spending spree.

But a 2012 report on consumer behaviour in the aftermath of natural disasters suggests the impulse runs deeper than any single crisis. "Some individuals went beyond purchasing necessities and instead bought designer products, music, travel services, and other discretionary goods,” Park said.

And Samuel Lins, who holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Porto in Portugal, told me that revenge spending is a global phenomenon that can affect anyone. “It’s not only in a specific country or culture that this can be observed,” Lins said.

This is the part where you can blame your brain

So why does instability cause us to spend money we probably don't have on things we don’t actually need? Lins cited reactance theory: “When our freedom is threatened, we want to recover it.” So when we feel like we can't spend, we feel a rebellious urge to do it anyway. Basically, we buy concert tickets for the same reason teenagers play music too loudly and refuse to listen to their parents.

Park adds two more theories to the mix, working in tandem: retail therapy and terror management theory. Retail therapy is (shocker) shopping as a method of coping with negative emotions like anxiety, anger, or fear. Terror management theory takes that idea further, suggesting that when people perceive a threat to their survival, those coping mechanisms kick into overdrive. Disaster situations trigger existential fear, and spending is how some of us quiet it. But you don't need a hurricane or a pandemic to trigger the impulse.

“More recently, revenge spending has appeared in subtler forms,” Park said. “Despite inflation, economic uncertainty, and geopolitical instability, certain luxury sectors have remained resilient.” She even mentioned “record-breaking concert and event spending” (guilty as charged).

Revenge spending can also happen on an individual level, Lins told me. Someone who moves back home after years on a student budget, or who lands a job after a stretch of unemployment, might find themselves suddenly spending in ways that surprise them. At the core of it, Lins says, are two emotions: frustration and a sense of deprivation. Sound familiar?

​Okay, but how do we stop?

Lins doesn't think revenge spending is inherently bad – unless, of course, it starts to do real damage to your finances. Sometimes, retail therapy really is the best therapy, but when we start spending more than we can afford on things we don’t need, it stops being therapy and starts becoming a problem. How can we scratch that itch without wrecking our finances?

“Self-awareness is the most important thing,” Lins told me. It’s hard to pump the brakes on something you don't realize you're doing. Getting into the habit of asking whether you're spending with intention or just reacting to how you feel is a good place to start.

Park's advice is to budget for it. “Rather than complete suppression, which can intensify rebound spending, allocating a discretionary budget allows emotional expression without financial harm,” she said.

Ultimately, both researchers agree that the goal is to understand what's really driving your spending, rather than to stop buying altogether. As Park put it, the real solution is “addressing the underlying emotional need rather than merely restricting spending behaviour.”

A January survey from TD suggests that two in three Canadians are planning to cut down their spending in 2026, so maybe all this revenge spending is finally catching up with us. But I don’t think the answer is to swear off all fun, especially when depriving ourselves of small luxuries in the short term is what makes us want to overspend later. If we’ve gotta do some revenge-spending this year – and my Ticketmaster history proves I'm no exception – then let’s do it smart. Let’s do it sparingly. Let’s do it on purpose.

So keep an eye out for me at the Bruno Mars show – I'll be the one checking my bank balance in between sets.