This article examines how consumers responded to the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). Based on 25 in-depth interviews conducted in Portugal during the first lockdown (April–July 2020), the study shows how everyday consumption was reconfigured not merely as functional adaptation, but as a cultural process involving moral reflection, identity negotiation, and emotional self-regulation. We develop an interpretive typology of four consumer orientations: Moral Minimalists, Creative Domesticators, Digital Drifters, and Reflective Realigners , situated within a perceptual matrix contrasting reflexivity and digital engagement. Each type illustrates how cultural logics, moral judgments, and digital infrastructures shaped distinct responses to systemic rupture. This framework contributes to CCT by theorizing crisis as a sociohistorical rupture that unsettles routines, foregrounds moral economies, and intensifies the interplay between agency and structure. It also extends sociological debates on moralized markets, domestic provisioning, and digital mediation, showing how everyday acts of shopping, cooking, and online connection became sites of symbolic negotiation and ethical distinction during disruption.
Sarmento et al. (Thu,) studied this question.