With urban aging and the rise of the silver economy, middle-aged and older adults face strong collective norms and rigid mandatory uniform dressing requirements when participating in recreational groups such as square-dancing teams and choirs. Such compelled strong-tie consumption has generated widespread alienated disposal behaviors, including wardrobe idling and "wear-then-return" (wardrobing / unethical return after use). Drawing on empirical survey data from 156 members of urban middle-aged and older recreational teams, binary logistic regression and grouped heterogeneity tests were used to unpack the mechanisms of such deviant consumer behavior. The findings are as follows: (1) The agency dilemma intensifies wardrobe idling. Channels intended to bridge the digital divide—surrogate purchasing and payment on one’s behalf—substantially strip older adults of perceived consumption control; older adults who purchase through surrogates are 4.5 times more likely to leave outfits left unused in storage than those who shop online independently. (2) Abnormal returns exhibit a pronounced U-shaped income effect. Both extremely low- and high-income groups show return probabilities more than three times those of the middle-income group, challenging the simplistic stereotype that "only bargain-hunting drives returns" and revealing a dual logic of "economic pressure" and "rights assertion through rule familiarity." (3) Micro-level organizational power structures reshape return motives. Under captain’s autocracy, returns (driven by high income and poor perceived quality) mainly appear as rights-based resistance among the structurally disadvantaged; under democratic voting, returns (driven by high-frequency performance exposure) evolve into tacit platform arbitrage and deal-hunting exploitation of rules to avoid costs. Theoretical boundaries for deviant consumer behavior in settings combining strong-tie collective constraints with aging populations are extended; the default portrayal of older adults as uniformly digitally disadvantaged subjects is challenged; quantitative evidence is provided for loss-prevention governance on silver-economy e-commerce platforms and for greener guidance of grassroots community cultural–recreational consumption.

Liao Li, Yang Yuchen, Cao Siyao. An Empirical Study of Wardrobing in Performance Apparel among Urban Middle-Aged and Older Adults. Frontiers in Sport Research (2026), Vol. 8, Issue 2: 35-41. https://doi.org/10.25236/FSR.2026.080206.

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