Remember first hearing someone use “COVID-19” in a sentence?
It likely wasn’t January 2020, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first announced a nameless new virus had arrived in the U.S. As late as Jan. 23, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) was assuring us that this “novel coronavirus” didn’t pose an international health threat.
A week later, the President Donald Trump administration announced it would deny U.S. entry to any foreign nationals that had recently visited China. Events moved quickly then. On Feb. 11, 2020, WHO designated the virus as COVID-19, likely not grasping what that would come to represent.
Even though experts are calling it less severe than the original strain, or even the 2021 delta variant, the omicron variant is having a chilling effect not unlike the original onset of the disease.
PYMNTS began surveying consumers on March 6, 2020, a week before Trump issued Proclamation 9994 on March 13, 2020, declaring a national health emergency. It was also the dawn of the digital shift. We just didn’t know it yet.
We’re struck by similarities between the original outbreak and this omicron episode, so we’re reviewing the arc of our coverage to gauge how far we’ve come (or not) on living with the coronavirus.
See the inaugural 2020 report: How Consumers Are Reorganizing Their Lives in the Wake of the Outbreak
Through a Glass, Darkly
PYMNTS’ first March 2020 report, Navigating The Pandemic: How Consumers Are Reorganizing Their Lives In The Wake Of The Outbreak, noted that “43.8% of consumers said they were traveling for personal reasons less often than they had before the outbreak,” while nearly 50% were traveling less for personal reasons. Travel would all but halt in the following months.
“We also found that 35.3% and 35.9% of consumers said they were dining at quick-service restaurants (QSRs) and sit-down restaurants less often than they had before the outbreak, respectively. The only activities consumers reported doing more frequently than before the outbreak were those they could do on their own.”
Compare that to Monday (Jan. 3), when dining news site Eater San Francisco reported, “Omicron cases continued to rise over the holidays, impacting whether or not restaurants were able to stay open at the start of the new year. In San Francisco, 600 new cases a day is the weekly average, and the city is now seeing a surge in hospitalizations, according to UCSF chair of medicine Bob Wachter and the San Francisco Chronicle. Following that trend, many restaurants have continued to report breakthrough cases and exposures among their staff, resulting in rolling temporary closures ranging from one night to a couple of weeks.”
PYMNTS’ initial study also observed the great digital shift heaving to life, with eCommerce ascending.
We found that 27.8% of the “somewhat” concerned and 12% of the “slightly” concerned were shopping in physical stores less than before the outbreak.
“This brick-and-mortar shopping decrease went hand in hand with an increase in digital shopping,” per the study, as the “share of ‘somewhat’ concerned consumers shopping online increased 18.4% after the outbreak began, while the share of slightly concerned consumers who did the same increased 10.2%.”
No surprise it sounded eerily familiar when, in the last days of December 2021, Apple announced it would close a dozen New York City Apple Stores over renewed COVID-19 concerns brought on by omicron. Apple has reportedly closed 20 stores in all due to omicron.
Meanwhile, the New York Post reported Tuesday (Jan. 4) that “Walmart closed nearly 60 stores for two days in December as a precaution against rising COVID-19 infections that have been driven by the omicron variant, according to a report. The largest retailer in the world, along with other major chains including CVS, Apple stores and various restaurants, closed the stores temporarily in Texas, New Jersey and Maryland to sanitize them, according to Reuters.”
Good thing that the digital shift is in full swing two years into the pandemic, giving consumers easy options to turn to when the weather outside is frightful — with omicron.
Turnarounds and Timelines
While PYMNTS’ April 2020 edition was optimistically called The Great Reopening — still really about a year away at that point — we had already identified the basic personas of the pandemic era consumer. Social shifters went online but preferred physical stores; safety shifters went all-in on digital due to virus fears; convenience shifters valued speed and digital ease above all; and office shifters were doing something temporary called “work from home.”
In some ways, work from home has proven no more temporary than COVID-19 itself, with 2022 office opening plans now up in the air — or off the table — until an omicron all-clear.
Hard to escape the feeling that the situation is backsliding a bit after the sunny outlook of summer 2021 when real reopening began, vaccines were plentiful and restrictions eased.
PYMNTS’ latest report in the COVID-19 series, The Post-Pandemic Consumer At 18 Months: Spending Now, Worrying Later found infection fears being pushed out by economic concerns.
See the latest study: The Post-Pandemic Consumer at 18 Months
The most recent study found 62% of all consumers either “very” or “extremely” worried about the pandemic’s ongoing impact on the U.S. economy, compared to 48% who reported feeling “very” or “extremely” concerned over health issues, and 44% fretted over its impact on their social lives.
Per that study, “Rising vaccination rates and receding vaccine hesitancy have cut consumers’ worries of infection in half. Just 29% of consumers now say they are ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ worried about contracting COVID-19 — less than half of the 60% who said the same in February. These trends strongly indicate that consumers’ fears of infection will continue to recede as vaccination rates increase.”
Recede those fears did, for a while, but as of December 20, 2021, the omicron variant had been detected in most U.S. states, and fear was back on the airwaves as the media ran with it.
The Wall Street Journal may have captured the current mood best with a Dec. 22 report that noted “companies, schools, governments and families are trying to apply lessons learned from two years of the pandemic to make life and business more normal.”
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