The Customer Is Always Right — But Which One?

There’s a moment every retailer eventually has, standing in their own store, watching two shoppers side by side and realizing they’re not actually shopping in the same reality.

One is scrolling their phone to compare prices while reaching for a product. The other walked in specifically because they saw your store on TikTok, took a photo near your display before touching anything, and is now reading your brand’s mission statement on the wall like they’re deciding whether to trust you with their firstborn.

Both are under 45. Both have money to spend. And they want almost entirely different things from you.

This is the Millennial/Gen Z split. If your store design isn’t accounting for it, you’re probably leaving one of them cold.

First, a surprising fact that changes the whole conversation

Let’s get the counterintuitive part out of the way early, because it reshapes everything else: Gen Z — the generation that grew up with smartphones surgically attached to their hands — is actually more likely to prefer shopping in physical stores than Millennials are.

According to a 2024 study by global strategy consultancy L.E.K., about two-thirds of Gen Z (64%) prefer shopping in-store to online, and 92% do research before they make a purchase. Meanwhile, Millennials trail at a distant 43% on that same in-store preference measure.

And it’s not a passive preference. Almost three-quarters of Gen Z shop in-person at least once a week, and the majority consider it an experience.

The generation everyone assumed would kill physical retail is, in many ways, keeping it alive. They just need you to hold up your end of the deal.

We covered a lot of Gen Z’s broader consumer psychology in our earlier piece, Gen Z: The Trailblazers of Retail’s Evolution. This article gets more specific about what their in-store behaviour actually demands from your physical environment — and how that compares to the Millennials shopping right beside them.

Who they actually are right now

Before getting into design implications, it helps to anchor these generations in where they actually are in life.

Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, making them 29 to 44 years old today. They’re established in their careers, giving them greater spending power, and are more likely to be going through major life milestones: getting married, moving into a home, having children. They are, in short, the people buying furniture, appliances, and everything that goes in a nursery.

Gen Z, born 1997 to 2012, are still in college or early careers. They have less disposable income individually, but their spending power is expected to grow to $12 trillion by 2030. They’re not who they’ll be yet. Retailers who write them off today are going to have a rough decade.

The Millennial shopper: experience matters, but don’t waste their time

Millennials are comfortable shoppers. They’ve been buying things online since dial-up was a reasonable option, so they don’t need a physical store to browse. What they do need is a reason to be there.

70% of Millennials report that the quality of the shopping experience influences where they shop. That’s not a small number. It means the majority of this cohort is actively making location decisions based on how good the experience feels — not just what’s in stock.

They’re also prone to impulse buying, with 74% reporting they do so regularly, and nearly as likely to make an impulse purchase on their phone as in-store. The journey from “seeing something” to “buying it” is short, but the environment still has to trigger the impulse in the first place.

For store design, this translates into a need for clear, confidence-inspiring visual environments. Millennials aren’t going to stand and read a product paragraph on a cluttered display. They’ve already read reviews at home. Your job in-store is to confirm that the brand lives up to what they researched — and to make the space feel worth the trip.

The Gen Z shopper: the store is the content

Gen Z’s relationship with physical retail is completely different in motivation, even if the destination is the same.

They’re not there because the experience is pleasant. They’re there because shopping has become social and visual in a way that only a physical space can deliver. Hashtags like #mallhaul and #shopwithme generate millions of views, turning stores into content studios. Your store isn’t just a place to sell things — it’s a backdrop, a set, and a credibility signal.

41% of Gen Z cite the ability to touch and see products as their primary reason for shopping in-store — up significantly from the year before. They want the tactile and the tangible, which no amount of AR try-on technology has fully replaced yet.

But here’s where the paradox gets interesting: Gen Z shoppers are actually more cautious spenders than Millennials, with 47% saying they prefer to wait a few days before making a purchase. They’re in your store, absorbing everything. They may not buy today. They’ll go home, research more, and come back — or they’ll convert someone else through the content they create while standing in your space.

The store has to earn that second visit, and it has to be worth photographing in the meantime.

There’s also a patience threshold retailers should take seriously: 3 in 5 Gen Z shoppers will abandon a purchase if the checkout line is long, and more than a quarter will leave if their preferred payment method isn’t available. They’ll give you a great deal of enthusiasm on the way in and zero tolerance on the way out.