Coronavirus fatigue from months of isolation and restrictions have prompted many of us to start venturing out to restaurants, gyms, and retail stores or meeting up with friends or family members we haven’t seen much since last spring.
But despite those brief periods of pre-COVID-19 normalcy, albeit with face masks and hand sanitizer in tow, the fact remains that the majority of us are still spending an awful lot of time at home.
And all of that time alone has led to drastic changes in how some of us live our lives. For example, I started waking up earlier and after seeing a friend of mine for the first time in months, I learned that she had started eating red meat, something she had always avoided pre-COVID.
“I’ve been reformed,” my friend told me, who was just as surprised when I was the first one to arrive for an early-morning breakfast.
But the most obvious change is reflected in our new consumer spending habits. For example, reported data has shown that people are spending much more at the grocery store and cutting down on dining out.
Panic buying also became prominent during the outset of the pandemic as shoppers stocked up on essentials such as toilet paper and hand sanitizer, which caused retailers to limit the number of purchases of those high demand items, said Celine Pannuti, head of European Staples and Beverages Research at J.P. Morgan, in a J.P. Morgan report.
According to J.P. Morgan’s research, sales of household cleaners and soap, vitamins and supplements, hair color, and coffee have been on the rise during the pandemic, while sales for cosmetics and sun care products have fallen sharply as people have canceled vacations and staying and working from home have become the norm.
However, some purchases made by people during lockdown may not have been as essential as they thought they would be.
In my case, thinking that I would turn to reading as a way to pass the time during quarantine, I purchased an Amazon Kindle, but months later, I haven’t used it once other than going through the process of setting it up.
It wasn’t an inexpensive purchase either, which got me wondering what other things people bought because they figured they would have more use for them since they were stuck at home.
With gyms closed or people canceling their memberships, there has been a boom in fitness equipment sales, with one report from Business Wire stating that exercise equipment sales have increased by 170 percent during the pandemic.
It may not be too much of a stretch to assume that not everyone who purchased exercise equipment during COVID is actually using it on a regular basis — perhaps someone’s new exercise bike is collecting dust just like my Kindle.
One of my co-workers, Olivia Falcigno said she was considering purchasing a piano keyboard, while another colleague, Steve Krause, said he purchased a huge LCD TV, “with all the bells and whistles,” including streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, since he would be home more often.
Shipra Gupta, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who studies how consumers react to scarcity, told Vox that such purchases may not be totally necessary, but they are an important way of exercising freedom that’s lost during a moment like quarantine.
In terms of quarantine purchases, Steve’s actually appears to be a fruitful one, as he said he watches it every night, because “what else am I supposed to do?”
With no end in sight to our new COVID lives, it appears the rest of us will be continuing to try to figure out ways to answer that question in the coming months.
As for me, before I make any more unnecessary purchases, I’ll try to validate the reasons I had for buying what I already have — anyone know of any good books?