How we ran the Christmas 2026 rent-to-own survey

About this study

• Who paid for it and why. VRTO, which commissioned and paid for the survey, publishes a directory of rent-to-own stores and sells listings and services to the companies it lists.
• Panel. An opt-in online panel (Prolific). It is not a probability sample. Results describe the respondents; we do not describe them as representative of the US population.
• Sample. 2,038 unique US adults, age 18 and over. Every respondent was paid. Duplicate participants were removed, keeping each person's first submission.
• Fielding. All 2,038 analyzed responses were submitted on August 22, 2026.
• Waves. Three data waves (102, 159 and 1,777 after removing duplicates), one questionnaire from the second wave on; the first wave lacked the year-over-year question. A separate 50-place soft launch of an earlier draft questionnaire was paused after 18 responses and is excluded.
• Weighting. None.
• Small groups. Any group under 101 respondents is reported as counts, not percentages, and marked small base and directional.
• Coverage. US residents only. The survey ran in English only.
• Precision. Simple-random-sample equivalents, for scale only: about 2.2 points either way for the full sample, 4.5 for the 476 planners, and 9.8 for the 101 rent-to-own and virtual rent-to-own planners. Conventional margins of error do not strictly apply to an opt-in panel.
• Review. The figures were checked by an internal recount and two AI-assisted audits we commissioned, below. A human methodology review is pending; this page will be updated when it lands.
• Data. Aggregates, crosstabs and an anonymized row-level file are published on the data page. The row file leaves out every identifier, every timestamp and every typed answer.

The records below are published as written, with participant identifiers, personal names and internal addresses replaced by "[removed]".

Internal recount, August 22, 2026

Every number below was recomputed from the raw Typeform exports with a fresh script written for this audit. No existing analysis code was read, imported, or reused; the only inputs were [removed], [removed], and [removed]. Where the claim and the recount disagree, the recount is stated first and the arithmetic is shown.

Verdict summary

Overall: DISCREPANCIES FOUND. two of them, both about base labelling and uniqueness, neither one moving a headline percentage by more than half a point.

Methodology notes

Independence. A single throwaway script read only the raw files. Field semantics were recovered by tabulating actual values rather than assuming the strings in the brief, this matters, because the real ftc_ever_used bands use a Unicode en-dash (Yes, 1 to 5 years ago, U+2013) and read Yes, in the last year, not the ASCII/within the last year forms the brief quoted. A filter written against the brief's literal strings would have silently returned zero.

Exact filter definitions used.

• Answered RO-11. ftc_ro11_satisfaction non-null. This field is non-null for exactly the 974 respondents whose ftc_ever_used is one of the three "Yes" bands, so the instrument's routing is airtight.
• Top-two-box. {"Very satisfied", "Somewhat satisfied"}.
• FTC-analog. answered RO-11 and ftc_ever_used ∈ {"Yes, in the last year", "Yes, 1 to 5 years ago"} and ftc_channel_history ∈ {"At a rental store", "Both"}. n=384 pooled.
• Likely. future_use_intent contains "likely" and not "unlikely", i.e. {"Very likely", "Somewhat likely"}. "Not sure" (n=141) counts as not-likely.
• Qualified. d1_primary non-null. 487 pooled, 432 in phase 3.
• Segments. from the q2 multi-select. The option strings are unambiguous, so no fuzzy matching was needed: RTO is the single option beginning Rent-to-own or lease-to-own, a weekly or monthly payment plan…(like Acima, Progressive Leasing, Katapult, Rent-A-Center, or Aaron's); BNPL is the single option A buy-now-pay-later plan (like Klarna, Afterpay, Affirm, Zip, or PayPal Pay in 4). rto = RTO without BNPL, bnpl = BNPL without RTO, dual = both. Substring tests on "Rent-to-own or lease-to-own" and "buy-now-pay-later" are exact and collision-free here. Note that "Layaway" and "A personal loan" are separate options and were deliberately excluded from both segments.
• Durations. submitted_at − landed_at, both ISO-8601 Z, parsed with datetime.fromisoformat.

A structural fact worth stating plainly. Segment counts are identical whether computed over qualified respondents or over the whole file (rto 40, bnpl 379, dual 68 pooled either way). That is not a coincidence and not an error: nobody who selected RTO or BNPL in q2 failed to reach d1_primary. The two bases coincide, so a report saying "segments among qualified planners" and one saying "segments among all respondents" would print the same numbers. Anyone reusing these figures should know the denominator is not doing any work.

Anomalies found

1. Duplicate participants, the one genuine integrity defect. The claim of no duplicate participant_id within or across waves is false on both halves.

• Within wave 1: participant id [removed] submitted twice (response ids [removed] and [removed]), 55 seconds apart, sharing one session_id ([removed]), the signature of a reload/resubmit, not a second recruitment. Both rows screened out (ftc_ever_used = "No, never"), so this one touches no reported statistic. It is also the only duplicated session id in the entire pooled file.

• Across waves: 37 further participant ids appear in two different waves, 16 wave1+phase3, 20 wave2+phase3, 1 wave1+wave2. The panel screened within each study but evidently not against prior studies in the series, so these are the same humans taking the instrument twice.

  Materiality: 51 duplicate-participant id rows answered RO-11 and 23 qualified; 25 participant ids answered RO-11 on both appearances and 9 qualified on both. Eight of the 38 gave inconsistent ftc_ever_used answers across their two sittings (one moved from "more than 5 years ago" to "in the last year"), which is a small but real test-retest signal.

  Effect on the headlines, keeping the first submission per participant id (N drops 2,076 → 2,038):

  Statistic	As claimed	Deduped	Delta
  RO-11 n / top-2	974 / 70.5%	949 / 70.2%	−0.3 pt
  FTC-analog n / top-2	384 / 82.0%	373 / 81.5%	−0.5 pt
  Future-use likely	59.3%	59.2%	−0.1 pt
  Qualified	487 (23.5%)	476 (23.4%)	−0.1 pt
  RTO-involved planners	108	101	−7

  Every headline percentage survives deduplication within half a point, so no substantive finding changes. The claim that the sample is 2,076 unique respondents is nonetheless wrong: it is 2,076 responses from 2,038 unique people, and that is how it should be described.

2. Two "pooled" labels that are really phase-3, and one the reverse. Claim 7 presents 24.6 / 20.3 / 15.4 / 9.2 / 8.0 as phase-3 category shares; those are the pooled figures. Phase-3 alone is 25.2 / 20.4 / 14.6 / 9.3 / 7.4. Conversely claim 9 presents 91 RTO-involved planners as pooled; 91 is phase-3 only (33 rto + 58 dual) and the pooled figure is 108 (40 + 68). The values are all internally correct, they have simply been attached to the wrong base in the write-up. Both need relabelling before publication, since the pooled N of 487 planners is quoted in the same breath as the phase-3 count of 91.

3. d1_primary outside d1, 96 qualified rows (19.7%). In 96 of 487 qualified rows the declared primary category is not among the categories the same respondent multi-selected in d1. Most are respondents who answered d1 = "Not sure yet" and were then still asked to name a primary; a handful are outright contradictions (one picked Toys as primary after selecting only "Gaming consoles"). Routing is otherwise perfect, the follow-up item column always matches d1_primary (0 mismatches), no row has more than one category's *_item filled, no qualified row lacks an item answer, and no unqualified row has one. This is an instrument-design wrinkle rather than a data defect, but any analysis that cross-tabs d1 against d1_primary will hit it.

4. Duration and straight-lining probes, clean. Phase-3 durations parse 1,813/1,813 with zero negatives, zero under 20 seconds, and zero over an hour. The fastest qualified completion is 68s and the fastest screen-out 20s, both plausible. Qualified median 186s versus screen-out median 80s is exactly the claimed separation. On straight-lining, 137 of 974 RO-11 answerers paired "Very satisfied" with "Very likely" and 15 paired "Very dissatisfied" with "Very unlikely", attitudinally coherent rather than mechanical, and there is no third scale item on which to detect a true flat-line, so this is a weak test that found nothing.

5. Column completeness, no column is >5% unparseable. Every core column is either 100% present (participant_id, study_id, session_id, response_id, landed_at, submitted_at, q1, ftc_ever_used, discovery_channels, ai_assistant_primary, trust_factor_primary) or missing exactly by design: q2 is absent for the 281 respondents who answered q1 "No"/"Not sure yet"; the three RO-11 block fields are absent for the 1,102 who never used RTO; d1/d1_primary/ d10 are absent for the 1,589 who did not reach the deep dive. All 487 qualified rows carry both d1 and d10, and every qualified row has q1 = "Yes". No empty-but-qualified rows exist.

6. Income distribution, unremarkable, mildly downscale, as expected. Among the 487 planners: under $25k 8.0%, $25 to 50k 24.8%, $50 to 75k 26.7%, $75 to 100k 15.0%, $100 to 150k 16.8%, $150k+ 8.0%, prefer-not-to-say 0.6%. Single-peaked at $50 to 75k with a plausible right tail; only 3 refusals, which is low but not implausible for a paid panel. Nothing here looks synthetic.

7. Fielding window. All three waves were collected on a single day, 2026-08-22, in non-overlapping blocks (wave 1 08:59 to 11:13Z, wave 2 17:57 to 19:59Z, phase 3 20:40 to 23:39Z). Same-day collection is consistent with the stated design, and the clean separation confirms the wave labels.

Overall verdict

DISCREPANCIES FOUND. but confined to labelling and to the uniqueness claim; all substantive percentages reproduce exactly.

Required corrections before publication:

1. Stop describing the sample as 2,076 unique respondents. It is 2,076 responses from 2,038 unique participants (1 within-wave resubmit, 37 cross-wave repeats). State this, and state that deduplication moves no headline by more than 0.5 pt.
2. Relabel claim 7's category shares as pooled, not phase-3.
3. Relabel claim 9's 91 RTO-involved planners as phase-3, or restate as 108 pooled to match the 487 pooled planner denominator quoted alongside it.

AI-assisted audit, August 23, 2026

[removed] ran an independent AI tool against the public survey pages and data files before public posting. Verdict: data integrity A- (all core counts and percentages reproduce); three material issues found, all CONFIRMED against the canonical dataset and FIXED the same day:

1. Multi-select denominators (presentation error). Discovery-channel and brand-consideration percentages were published as share of SELECTIONS, not share of RESPONDENTS. Corrected to respondent incidence: Google 82.5%, store/Amazon sites 74.6%, AI assistants 34.5% (of all 2,038); Affirm 49.2%, PayPal Pay in 4 45.8%, Klarna 45.4% (of 476 planners with a brand answer). The correction STRENGTHENED the AI-discovery finding (34.5% vs the misleading 10.4%).
2. all.budget object mislabeled. The published JSON's all-planners budget object actually held BNPL-only item-cost bands. Restructured to explicit constructs: rto_weekly_payment_budget (n=101) and bnpl_item_budget (n=375), never combined.
3. Sampling disclosure. The studies used the panel's STANDARD US sample (blocklisted waves), NOT the census-matched representative-sample product. All published surfaces now state this explicitly and avoid "nationally representative"/"of Americans" phrasing; margins of error disclosed per cut (2.2 / 4.5 / ~10 pts).

Also affirmed by the auditor: segment arithmetic, the FTC RO-11 replication and its 81.5%-vs-75.0% comparison (difference significant at ~p<.05, phrased as a levels difference, not a time trend), and the AI-usage claims. RTO subgroup (n=101) treated as descriptive with disclosed noise.

Published aggregate payload (as corrected): [removed] (same file served at [removed] and survey.vrto.com/data.json, with anonymized microdata at /rows.csv on both).

Second AI-assisted audit, August 23, 2026

Second independent AI audit, run by [removed] against the public pages, data.json, and the published anonymized rows.csv (checksum-verified against our declared SHA-256). Overall judgment: "substantively useful and unusually transparent"; every headline figure REPRODUCED (2,038/476/375/101 segments, 70.2%/81.5% satisfaction, 74.0%/85.7%/92.1% AI use, category shares, budget bands); no duplicates, no timestamp anomalies, branch logic "highly coherent", no basis for excluding any respondents. It additionally computed the 81.5%-vs-75.0% FTC comparison as statistically significant (z≈2.90, p≈0.004) with the correct caveat that it is a levels difference across eras/modes, not a trend estimate.

Findings confirmed and CORRECTED same day

1. "Single frozen instrument across all waves" was wrong. The year-over-year spend item was added AFTER wave 1 (89 wave-1 shoppers have no YoY answer). Metadata now documents instrument versions per wave and the item's true base (1,669 waves-2/3 shoppers); the page's YoY panel states it.
2. "Open-text columns excluded" overstated. Three short respondent-typed item fields remained. Re-scanned (automated regex + manual review): no emails, phones, addresses, or names. Anonymization statement now lists exactly what is retained.
3. Conventional MOE framing not valid for an opt-in panel (AAPOR). Recast on all surfaces as "simple-random-sample equivalents, shown for scale only," with the opt-in panel status stated first.
4. Response dispositions unpublished. Panel per-wave dispositions (places, approved, returned, timed-out; zero rejections) now published in method_facts.
5. Fielding window ambiguity. Now stated in UTC with local-time note; pre-freeze test wave exclusion restated.
6. Instrument-logic notes added: 21 "Not sure yet + definite method" co-selections (non-exclusive multi-select design); segment label precision ("BNPL" = BNPL selected, no RTO/LTO).

Logged for the NEXT wave (not retroactively fixable)

• Use the panel's census-matched representative sampling (or explicit quotas + weights) for any population-level claims; collect/merge full-sample demographics (age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region).
• Neutral category definitions in the qualifier (no brand names); unaided brand recall BEFORE aided lists; randomize non-ordered multi-select options; make "Not sure yet" exclusive; trust as ranking/MaxDiff rather than forced single choice; balance the RTO description (lease structure + return right, per FTC's own description, not only the ownership endpoint).
• Publish the full questionnaire with screen order and display logic (currently: available to qualified reviewers on request, stated in method_facts).
• Report effect sizes with any test; multiplicity control for subgroup comparisons.

Explicitly N/A per the auditor

Cronbach's alpha (no multi-item reflective scale exists, do not fabricate one); traditional straight-lining (no repeated rating battery); survey response rate (requires recruitment dispositions beyond completions, partially addressed by publishing the panel dispositions, but AAPOR-standard response rates remain non-computable for panel quotas).

Corrections shipped to both live sites and mirrored in [removed] (checksums refreshed). Third-party verdict quote for the record: the strongest version of this study is "a well-documented descriptive opt-in panel study", which is exactly how all published surfaces now describe it.

Corrections log