BLOG POST

Spirits are up across the country, just not those spirits.

People are stocking their shelves with booze and often imbibing while Zooming with others. Reports show alcohol consumption up 42 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area last week. Daily users of the video chat app Zoom have also reportedly increased twentyfold since December.

It’s a lifestyle change no one saw coming, at least not until the coronavirus pandemic. This is just one of the many new normals sprouting from shelter-in-place orders sweeping the nation.

As boredom sets in, people are finding ways to socialize. Zoom, for instance, has emerged as the virtual bar of choice given its ease of use, although Zoom recently has had to fend off a security breach that allowed hackers to expose video recordings.

[Related: The CMO Council’s new retail and CPG report, “Measuring Marketing in the Moment,” is available for free for a limited time. Download here.]

Not everything, though, is new-age digital.

Many people are filling time with traditional activities such as baking. Catalina Marketing, a provider of shopper intelligence for CPG brands and retailers, says there’s a surge in flour sales and baking mix sales, up 154 percent and 99 percent, respectively, over the same year prior.

Can you guess another hot retail category? Here’s a hint. What do you get when people are stuck at home, bored, and worried about catching a virus? Answer: They clean like crazy. Catalina says sales of household cleaning goods are up 102 percent.

Here’s a bit of good news: It appears panic buying of toilet paper and other sundries is easing. In the last week of March, shoppers made fewer trips to grocery and drug stores, although their basket sizes continued to grow, according to Catalina.

That’s quite a change, considering that store visits took off only a couple weeks earlier.

Other hot retail categories, as reported in our mid-March blog post, include books, powdered milk, dry soups, chlorine bleach, deodorant soap bars and, yes, condoms. Then again, there are new reports that divorces are up.

But that’s a different story.