With many high street retailers having to shut down their stores due to the coronavirus pandemic, many families and individuals are now having to resort to online shopping for non-essential items such as clothing, books and physical formats of music. Additionally, the use of online services have dramatically increased during lockdown, with many people finding the internet to be the best place to tackle their lockdown boredom.
One known example is the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo released its hugely anticipated Animal Crossings: New Horizons on 20th March, coincidentally the day when schools were ordered to close. What wasn’t a coincidence was the sudden surge in Nintendo Switch sales. In March 2020, the Nintendo Switch sales was more than double the amount sold in March 2019. The Nintendo Switch Lite became extraordinarily popular, with retailers such as Curry’s, Amazon and Game running out of stock. Amara Mountford explained how difficult it was to obtain the Switch, ‘tracking the Switch’s stock on the website Stockinformer… getting notifications whenever it comes back in stock on amazon… seconds later we try to order one but its already sold out. This happens at least once every hour’. Amara had finally received her Switch after waiting for approximately 3 weeks for the Switch to come back in stock.
Whilst the overall level of consumption in the UK economy has fallen, teenagers and young adults have seized this opportunity for online clothes shopping. Many brands that are catered towards this demographic such as Urban Outfitters, ASOS, Pull&Bear, are offering many promotions such as 50% sales or free shipping, enticing the young into buying their products. Whilst it can be clearly seen that these measures have been made so that the level of economic activity within these stores can keep them afloat, it has led to people increasing their total expenditure in a single purchase. The idea of free delivery is especially drawing to those as some clothing companies do not offer the chance of free delivery. Furthermore, many teenagers have said that to tackle boredom of lockdown, they have resorted to online shopping, even if in the long run it will serve them nearly little to no use. I myself have bought some LPs even though I do not own a turntable setup.
Online services such as music streaming and gaming have seen a huge increase in activity. Steam, a video game digital distribution service, has broken concurrent player records. On the 28th April 12:08, over 20 million users were logged in, peaking at 23,315,013 at 5pm, April 27th. In the final week of march, global Spotify chart streams rose by 3%. By no doubt has there been an increase in Youtube videos created and viewed during the lockdown, with creators making new series centred around life under lockdown. The app House party (used for online video calls with up to 8 people) has reached 2nd place in the most popular social networking app in the App Store. Zoom has taken the number one spot for top free apps on the App Store.
If COVID-19 had struck us 20 years ago, we would have had a much more difficult life in entertaining ourselves at home. Statista released a report that showed that in 1999 only 13% of households had any form of access to the internet, a miniscule amount compared to the 93% of households with internet access in 2019. With widespread access to the internet, many are coping better than they would be without it.
