Back to normal or permanent shifts in demand?
Life changed dramatically for people in Switzerland in spring 2020 when the Federal Council announced the lockdown in mid-March. Unable to go to restaurants, bars or shopping malls, people found new ways to spend their leisure time.
Two food-related activities stood out: baking bread and ordering food online. Baking was so widespread that The Economist wrote about it in July. As the magazine noted, once the downturn was over people should probably leave bread-making to the experts and focus on bread-winning at their normal jobs. Likewise, when restaurants reopened many people quickly abandoned food delivery and went out again.
This raises a question: did the Covid-19 shock lead only to short-term changes in how people spend their leisure time, or are there lasting shifts in demand?
Using trendEcon we can see how Google search frequencies evolved over the past weeks, months and years, and test whether preferences shifted temporarily or permanently. Below we show Brot backen (baking bread), Essen bestellen (order food) and Netflix.
For some keywords the data show a short-term boom: interest in baking bread or food delivery surged during the lockdown but fell back equally fast once restrictions eased. Gardening-related searches, by contrast, stayed elevated compared with pre-Corona times. The year-on-year views below make the pattern clear: food delivery and gardening both ran above earlier years through 2020.
If these habits stick, companies will face a different consumer demand in future, with first-order implications for investment decisions. trendEcon helps by offering timely insight into how consumer preferences are shifting.