RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE SITREP: WalletHub Reports: 5% plan to spend less on New Year’s vs. last year, Top 12 financial resolutions.

So a few observations I’ve been meaning to blog about. First, there have seemed to be fewer people shopping everywhere I go. Crowds, parking lots, lines at stores, none have seemed up to previous Christmases. We drove down to Atlanta with a friend last month — she and Helen shopped a lot at boutiques, and we visited a fancy furniture store — and again, lots of parking and not that many people shopping.

Second, people I’ve talked with have repeated a theme of spending less. Some of it’s from financial worries — justified, I think — regarding the coming year, some of it’s because they got used to buying less stuff during Covid. (Why buy clothes when you’re working from home in sweatpants?) A lot of people discovered that they didn’t need to go out, or shop, or whatever nearly as much as they had been doing.

Friends who own bars and restaurants agree that a lot of people just got out of the habit of going out and haven’t gotten back into it. And we know some couples where the wife discovered that she’d rather stay home with the kids, and that the savings on day care, commuting, etc. meant that going from two jobs to one wasn’t much of a financial sacrifice. And lots of people who never cooked dinner got used to it, and discovered it was better and healthier and cheaper.

So this is all anecdotal and impressionistic, but I think the Covid stuff may have induced lasting changes. They’re not necessarily bad changes — cooking at home more is surely good — but they may make it harder to recover from a down economy.