Americans are expected to spend a record $26.3 billion during Amazon’s four-day Prime Day sale — and almost none of it feels celebratory. The summer of “butter yellow,” the shade of consumer anxiety, comes with an earlier-than-ever flagship event for the Fortune 1 company, which says a lot about spending in fear.
This year’s event, which kicked off Tuesday and runs through Friday, is on pace to eclipse Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. But beneath the record-breaking headline is a set of numbers that tells a quieter, more unsettling story about the state of the American consumer in the summer of 2026.
