COVID-19 is the best salesman
When cases go down, profits go up. (Photo: BGSU)
Who knew that fearing for our lives so much to the point that we all had to lock ourselves in from the rest of the world would motivate our spending habits to go further than maybe some of us would like to admit? The Britons definitely think so.
John Lewis & Partners, a brand of high-end department stores from Great Britain, recently published an annual report which shows how much the locals have shifted their buying habits since the lockdowns.
Why are we talking about a department store, you ask? Because what John Lewis & Partners is doing is exactly what you’d expect from a business in this day and age, they’re trying to make profit off of the situation. Honestly, who can blame them?
John Lewis is trying to position themselves as a place that’s open “for all life’s moments." This is a direct response to what the fancy department store brand is calling the “moments economy” wherein Britons are spending more on daily expenses such as dinner parties rather than splurging on holiday trips.
A "healthier" economy
They might come from another country, but the patterns they see in their own consumer spending mirror what we can observe from our own experiences as well. Here are just a few examples:
With the gradual return of face-to-face interactions, the use of public transportation has risen. As a result, demand for laptop bags and travel mugs shot up by 5% and 65% respectively.
Now that there’s less time for all the hobbies people picked up when we were all in isolation from each other, John Lewis has stopped trying to sell wall-mounted desks while bread bin sales dropped by 42%. Remember when almost everyone started to bake? Imagine the stress bakeshops endured witnessing all of that.
Notice how a lot of what people are spending on right now are what we didn’t have for nearly two years? All those gatherings and celebrations were canceled with a band-aid solution of having everything on Zoom. I’ll never forget the time I attended a Christmas party in nothing but my boxers. Good times.
Unfortunately, we can’t do things like that anymore. With physical events making a fast comeback, sales of occasion hats skyrocketed by 168%, and the demand for champagne flutes and wine glasses surged by 88%.
Interestingly enough, even the content we were consuming affected the way some people purchase items. Remember Bridgerton on Netflix? The series takes place in the Regency era of England but features a remix of Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball in a ball scene. Anyway, that show helped bring corset sales up by 5%. And with the upcoming live-action Barbie film, sales of pink lipstick and clothing have increased by 83% and 22% respectively.
We already saw a glimpse of this happen during the peak of the pandemic with the likes of the video game and streaming industries breaking record profits. Remember when there were conversations about movie theaters going out of business? Back in 2020, the entire global theatrical and home and mobile entertainment market garnered $80.8 billion. This was the lowest since 2016. Now in 2022, Top Gun: Maverick is beating every single box office record we never thought it could.
If you take candy away from a child long enough, they’ll start to crave it until they can finally have it get their fill. We’re all the child, and everything else that we weren’t locked in with is the candy.
