A new indicator for working from home and what Black Friday has to do with it
Working from home put new objects on consumers' shopping lists. Where the home was mainly for living before, it now had to be fit for work too. Monitors, cables and other work items have been in high demand since spring (see e.g. Bloomberg).
trendEcon combined Google queries around the new normal of working from home into an index, covering the search terms headset, monitor, mouse and hdmi. You probably googled at least one of these in spring or autumn. The index moves strongly with the lockdowns: the March uptick was extremely strong, and after a summer decline demand for home-office electronics rose again.
A comparison with previous years shows that, despite the summer dip, interest stayed above the level of earlier summers. It is also striking that towards the end of November demand for electronics rises in every year shown.
The short answer for those November swings: Black Friday. The discount battle has been delighting Swiss consumers for a few years now. In the next post we look at how Black Friday and the Cyber Week that followed affected demand for electronics and their retailers, such as Galaxus and Interdiscount.