I recently had Covid, and I don’t care whether you are 13 or 43 - getting sick in the summer wrenches your soul through your eye sockets like a poetic contrapasso from Dante’s infamous circles of hell. There I was: languid, pale, uncomfortably moist, doom scrolling daytime social media until my thumbs ached while the world outside danced in the sunshine.
Suffice it to say I had a lot of time to lie next to my A/C and think. To think about Covid; about the economy; about the shortages and now excesses of goods we are experiencing in its wake; about where our collective zeitgeist for wanting stuff remains. The whiplash of plague and subsequent “Covid Hangover” has left us all a little linguino, as we say in Italian. It has left us not unlike a sickly, skinny kid in the summer, exhausted and too hot to want to consume anything.
This mental image reflects how I think about our consumer culture at this very moment. We are all a little tired and over it. DTC brands have lost their luster. No amount of well-heeled influencers stuffed into a Hamptons house inspire us to want another olive oil company. We already redecorated our homes with tiny checkered pillows and secondhand candle holders. And who can bear another boat picture from the Mediterranean this July from an officially micro-trended tomato girl? Don’t we all just want a summer detox, to maybe quit alcohol, and to live longer?
I can’t prove this shift for sure, but there are two graphs I keep coming back to:
The first is from McKinsey. For the first time since the pandemic, spending declined across all age groups and income groups.
To me, this underscores the notion that we are all not only fearful for what may come in the economy, but maybe more so that we are encountering a sort of post-apocalyptic malaise where we are readdressing what really matters and what’s worth spending money on (or not). Not surprisingly, the decline in spending was the steepest among low-income consumers, who continue to penny pinch while our billionaires train to duke it out in the Thunderdome.
The second graph is not really a graph (gotcha!) but a report from Berenberg Research that shows Gen Z drink 20% less per capita than Millennials, who drink less than both Gen X and Boomers.
My friend Dan says this tweet is hate speech, which really makes me laugh. I think, perchance, just like we are over the old spending patterns, we might be over old socializing habits, too. The TOMS shoes guy thinks so.
My prognosis? We need a little inspiration to shake the dull, hot heat from our eyelids. We need a metaphysical and literal detox, and I think new forms of consumption are coming around the corner. We are in store for less consumerism, more thrift; less jungle juice, and more sobriety. Are you shopping, drinking, socializing less?
Next, I’m headed off to Portugal to surf with fellow female VCs, organized by Laura Chau, as will be documented on social.
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ADDENDUM:
This is my attempt at shorter, perhaps more poignant, rambles on consumers, commerce, and all the things I’m noticing as an operator-turned-VC. Please let me know if I’m moving in a good direction.