Inform Pillar | Procurement Knowledge for SMB Buyers
5 min read
Economic Anxiety Is Making Your Procurement Decisions for You
Sylvia Luchian
Founder & Head of Procurement Practice
Two-thirds of employees globally worry that trade policies and tariffs will hurt their employer.1 Economic anxiety is at an all-time high. When anxiety is high, decision-making quality drops. People default to the familiar, avoid risk, and delay decisions that feel uncertain.
If you are a business owner responsible for significant purchasing decisions, that anxiety is making its way into your procurement process whether you are aware of it or not. You are delaying supplier switches that should happen. You are renewing contracts without renegotiating because renegotiating feels risky. You are accepting price increases that should be challenged because challenging them feels like creating conflict. Economic anxiety is understandable. Letting it run your procurement decisions is expensive.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer describes a world where people are narrowing their circles, avoiding risk, and defaulting to familiar ground.2 In procurement, fear-driven behaviour looks like this. You know your IT contract is due for renewal and the price is not competitive, but you renew anyway because switching feels like too much disruption. You have a supplier who is consistently underdelivering but you keep renewing because finding a replacement feels overwhelming.
Each individual decision feels reasonable. Collectively, they represent a procurement posture that’s costing your business real money. The research across both the 2025 and 2026 Edelman reports is consistent: economic anxiety leads to risk aversion, and risk aversion leads to the preservation of the status quo even when the status quo is not working.
Key Takeaway: Fear is a valid feeling. It’s not a procurement strategy. Every contract renewal decision should be made deliberately, not by default. If you are renewing a contract without reviewing the market, you are not making a decision. You are making an omission.
Status quo procurement has a very specific cost pattern. It accumulates slowly and invisibly until it becomes a problem that’s hard to ignore. Supplier pricing drifts upward because you never test the market. Service quality declines because there is no competitive pressure. Your business becomes operationally dependent on suppliers who know you are not going to leave, which shifts the power dynamic in the relationship.
D1 Advisory regularly works with businesses who have been paying above-market rates for years because the thought of going through a tender process felt worse than the ongoing cost. When we run the numbers on what that decision has cost them, the impact is almost always larger than they expected.
The irony is that a proper procurement process reduces anxiety rather than creating it. When you know you have tested the market properly, negotiated a fair price, and built a contract that protects you, you sleep better. The process that feels scary upfront creates the confidence that makes the ongoing relationship manageable.
Key Takeaway: Status quo procurement is not the absence of risk. It’s the accumulation of risk over time. The comfortable choice now is often the expensive choice later.
A business with a clear procurement policy knows when contracts are due for renewal. It knows what review process is required before renewal. It has a process for going to market that’s not invented from scratch every time. That structure doesn’t eliminate anxiety. It contains it. Instead of an undefined, open-ended sense that procurement decisions are hard, you have a defined process that breaks the decision into manageable steps. Each step is achievable. The outcome is a decision you made deliberately, not one that happened to you.
Key Takeaway: Structure is the antidote to anxiety in procurement. Build a forward calendar of contract renewals. Know when your reviews are due. Make your decisions before the deadline forces them.
One of the simplest and highest-value tools in procurement is a forward contract calendar. It’s a list of every supplier contract your business holds, with the renewal date, the notice period required to exit, and the date by which you need to start a market review if you want to have a real choice at renewal time.
Most businesses don’t have one. They find out a contract is due for renewal when the invoice arrives or the supplier sends a renewal notice. At that point, the decision has already been made by default. The calendar puts you back in control. It’s not a complex procurement tool. It’s a spreadsheet with dates on it. The value is not in the sophistication. It’s in the discipline.
Key Takeaway: If you don’t know when every supplier contract in your business is due for renewal, you are not managing your procurement. You are reacting to it. A forward contract calendar is the starting point for every other procurement discipline.
1 Edelman Trust Institute 2026, 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust Amid Insularity, Edelman, New York, viewed 15 May 2026, https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer, p. 7.
2 Edelman Trust Institute 2026, 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, p. 9.
Procurement is trust brokering in commercial form. When done properly, it creates the conditions under which buyers and suppliers can exchange value with confidence.
Small and specialist suppliers are operating in a more economically precarious environment than three years ago. Their costs have risen. Margins have compressed.
When a vendor relationship goes wrong, it rarely feels like a commercial dispute. It feels like a betrayal. You were promised something.
