Trends Spreading From The Virus Scare

If you are still listening, watching, tracking the news, you probably have heard the name of the virus enough times that you have tuned out. The news media is having an orgasm right now.

It’s like watching an alcoholic who just devoured a second fifth. And we are not taking about the fifth amendment!

The Nielsen, Arbitron and Google tracking numbers are climbing at a pace that is a reverse mirror of Wall Street. All driven by the media news rage.

Tomorrow I am participating in a Podcast about the wonderful days ahead for Amazon and home delivery.

The EXPERIENCE blog resides on The Medium.com hosting website. Each day I receive a morning and afternoon set of postings from The Medium.

They are jam packed too with virus stats, impending doom and writings about the world coming to an end.

Perhaps now that Starbucks has temporarily closed down its cafes and is only serving lattes via the drive-thru, the Blog writers will come down from their caffeine highs.

This writing is NOT about the virus, but rather what we will like see in the marketplace once the scare wears out.

And with no further general commentary, here they are…

Real Estate Will Boom

Contrary to Great Doom and Great 21st Century Depression that the media is forecasting, the housing market is going to explode.

It is Spring in the South and Spring hitting the Midwest and Northeast is about a month away.

Millennials who are cooped up today with limited access to the outdoors are also spending more personal time together. And together they are creating a surge we will see surface in new births around December of 2020 and January of 2021.

Babies will come and those apartment walls will be closing in.

Empty nest Boomers are pondering right now just how much those retirement funds will continue to fuel their country club lifestyle.

Closer in ‘hoods with one level condos all of a sudden are making sense.

Interest rates are at the lowest level they have been for years. There are Federal housing assistance programs clearing the Senate as I write this blog.

Cruising Zillow sure beats staring at the walls and is a heck of a lot more positive than listening to another round of health experts doing a roundtable talk on one of the snooze… oh I mean, news networks.

Housekeeping & Cleaning

The catalyst is washing hands and singing Happy Birthday twice in succession until you can turn off the water and towel dry the hands.

Thank you CDC.

Long time overdue, cleaning is actually becoming cool. From washing hands to cleaning counters to cleaning dishes to cleaning bathrooms.

This morning there was even a blog post that bidets might finally make it to the U.S. as bathroom tissue is one of the hottest CPG products on the store shelves… or should I say, we can longer find on the store shelves.

I was very surprised… even pleasantly surprised… to see the empty shelves where they sell the house cleaners. Counters carrying the body washes and hand soaps are also low in stock.

A college student website I hit actually had a set of steps on how to wash bed linens. Be still my heart. Cleanliness might even hit the dorm rooms!

My bet is that maid service is going to be a hot sales edge for the apartments and lodging trade.

We will soon see ads about how often the rooms are cleaned and the added value of home cleaning services.

The Return of Wall Separators

I knew that this would soon return.

Okay… Okay… that great open space makes those 800 square feet apartments and cramped homes look much more live-able, but come-on it’s a BGO (Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious) taking hold.

Especially with those grand white cabinet, granite-topped, silver appliance kitchens that dominate the 800 square feet even more than the sitting room itself.

As soon as the Millennials found out that home delivery food service was being cut off and they had to purchase one of those gourmet meal kits the cooking smells overwhelmed not only the sitting room but did away with the romance of the bedroom too.

Then he needs space to work and she needs space to work and sharing space together in that open living space just does not breed co-working space that has the individual sound booths for calls at the open air work space

Yes… and when he wants to watch the ESPN re-runs and relive the bowl games… and she wants to watch HGTV House Hunter shows… well the idea of a TV room, a family room, a she-shed, a man’s cave… all those GenXer rooms appear to be actually great ideas!

Keeping folks at a distance from one another is going to make boundaries actually appear functional again.

LOL… best of all is that as the gold, avocado and even chocolate brown and pretty pink sinks become mid-century chic so too are the walls that defined the function of the space.

Home Farming / Gardening

It’s already started. I do not make this up. A Millennial guy I am getting to know who is married and has two small Alpha Generation kids sent me an iPhone photo of six small chicks he got for his kids.

He went on to text me about how they are being used to help his kids understand science class better. Now that he and his wife have become overnight home schoolers.

While the Starbucks might be drive through only right now, the Big Box stores are not. The department that is getting the most traffic is the gardening department.

Folks are buying tomato and pepper plants, blueberry bushes, seed packets and small gardening shovels and trowels.

Shoot, the sales folks told me that they are nearly out of potting soil.

I asked a couple of Boomers at a Home Depot if that had always gardened and they told me, “no, not really, but the foods that come from their new garden plots will not be contaminated and touched by people that have diseases and viruses.”

On the other end of the factors rattling the cages of the consumer psyche, the biggest form of food that is clearing the shelves is not the fresh vegetables and fruits, but the canned versions.

A Publix clerk filling the shelves with new shipments of peas and beans told me that customers believe that they will lose electricity next and at least the canned goods can survive on the pantry shelves.

Vacation Travel

After the energy crisis that hit back in the 1970s, the prediction was that small, compact cars would be all the rage driving the future of autos in the U.S.

Wrong.

Before the crisis, we still referred to them as “station-wagons” … after the crisis a new term appeared… “SUV.”

Someone told me that cruise lines will never come back. I told that person that a hot stock to buy is NCL or Royal Caribbean.

After being constrained and pent up for weeks… not even months… Summer will be the season of vast vacation travel.

More of it will be car… or SUV-anchored, but the airlines, the cruise lines, the planned group tours … all will come back 10-fold+.

Along with travel bookings going through the rook, RVs and camping gear will see a surge too.

Driven To Discover

To all of the readers of my blog, do know that I sometimes ponder whether I should go and do something else than personally owning and running EXPERIENCE.

It would be a whole lot easier to have a steady salary and benefits and even some assurance that when the market turns upside down, a paycheck will be there.

But then I realize that I do enjoy what I do and get a kick out of how observations I make and strategic counsel I give actually generate smart results that conventional thinking competition fails to experience. (no pun intended!)

This is a wild time. Something that I never expected.

But it too shall pass…. and also generate market change.

In the great database world of today we expect linear changes and outcomes.

I hope your competitors and my competitors stay on their linear paths.

And I hope that you pick up the phone and call me and we together drive our brands to capitalize on the surprises to come… that you get as much of a kick as I do taking on the curves, mountain climbs and other creative off-road pathways vs. the linear highways others find leading to no where.