Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 25th of May 2020 to The Sounding Line.
Enjoy The Sounding Line? Click here to subscribe for free.
Enjoy The Sounding Line? Click here to subscribe.
The following chart, from Visual Capitalist and based on data from 1010Data, shows the dramatic changes to US consumer spending habits since the start of the Coronavirus outbreak in the US in late January. The data goes until May 12th.
Some highlights include:
- Consumer spending in general has declined 30% year-over-year
- Grocery spending peaked at +97% year-over-year on March 18th, 2020
- Grocery home delivery jumped +558% year-over-year at its peak on April 19th, 2020
- Fine dining spending plunged -88.2% year-over-year
- Spending on cruises plunged -87% year-over-year
Update: As commenter correctly pointed out, the graphs for cruise-ship and airline travel spending go below -100% year-over-year. Because we didn’t create this graphic, it is not clear exactly what is driving that. Presumably, it is rebates/refunds. Keep that in mind when viewing the infographic below.
Would you like to be notified when we publish a new article on The Sounding Line? Click here to subscribe for free.
Would you like to be notified when we publish a new article on The Sounding Line? Click here to subscribe for free.
Its pretty hard to get interested in data that shows more than a 100% decline in an item………… (airline and cruise travel – last graph)
Well…. it is hard to argue with that. Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll add a note to the top. I shared the graphic, didn’t create it (its from Visual Capitalist) and wouldn’t have had I noticed that myself.
Thanks
It is very easy to explain if you think about it for 5 seconds. The >100% decline includes cancellations. Most people book airline and cruise tickets weeks or months ahead of time.
That’s the first thing that went through my head and it’s likely the explanation (hopefully), but… it would still require the statistic to capture a negative value for a consumer spending category for a given month, which isn’t really consistent with the implied meaning of the graphs. If 100 people booked a cruise last year and 1 person booked one this year, I would expect the statistic to be -99%, not -150% because some of them got refunds on money that they spent at a prior point in the time series. Nonetheless, I changed the wording of my caveat in… Read more »