Markets
How U.S. Consumers are Spending Differently During COVID-19
In 2019, nearly 70% of U.S. GDP was driven by personal consumption.
However, in the first quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has initiated a transformation of consumer spending trends as we know them.
Consumer Spending in Charts
By leveraging new data from analytics platform 1010Data, today’s infographic dives into the credit and debit card spending of five million U.S. consumers over the past few months.
Let’s see how their spending habits have evolved over that short timeframe:
The above data on consumer spending, which comes from 1010Data and powered by AI platform Exabel, is broken into 18 different categories:
- General Merchandise & Grocery: Big Box, Pharmacy, Wholesale Club, Grocery
- Retail: Apparel, Office Supplies, Pet Supplies
- Restaurant: Casual dining, Fast casual, Fast food, Fine dining
- Food Delivery: Food delivery, Grocery Delivery, Meal/Snack kit
- Travel: Airline, Car rental, Cruise, Hotel
It’s no surprise that COVID-19 has consumers cutting back on most of their purchases, but that doesn’t mean that specific categories don’t benefit from changes in consumer habits.
Consumer Spending Changes By Category
The onset of changing consumer behavior can be observed from February 25, 2020, when compared year-over-year (YoY).
As of May 12, 2020, combined spending in all categories dropped by almost 30% YoY. Here’s how that shakes out across the different categories, across two months.
General Merchandise & Grocery
This segment saw a sharp spike in initial spending, as Americans scrambled to stockpile on non-perishable food, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper from Big Box stores like Walmart, or Wholesale Clubs like Costco.
In particular, spending on groceries reached a YoY increase of 97.1% on March 18, 2020. However, these sudden panic-buying urges leveled out by the start of April.
Feb 25, 2020 YoY Spending | May 5, 2020 YoY Spending | Overall Change | |
---|---|---|---|
Big Box | +14.2% | -1.5% | -15.7% |
Grocery | +1.0% | +9.4% | +8.4% |
Pharmacy | -3.6% | -23.8% | -20.2% |
Wholesale Club | +13.0% | +2.6% | -10.4% |
Pharmaceutical purchases dropped the most in this segment, possibly as individuals cut back on their healthcare expenditures during this time. In fact, in an April 2020 McKinsey survey of physicians, 80% reported a decline in patient volumes.
Retail
With less foot traffic in malls and entire stores forced to close, sales of apparel plummeted both in physical locations and over e-commerce platforms.
Feb 25, 2020 YoY Spending | May 5, 2020 YoY Spending | Overall Change | |
---|---|---|---|
Apparel | -5.6% | -51.9% | -46.3% |
Office Supplies | -8.9% | -2.8% | +6.1% |
Pet Supplies | +2.7% | -18.5% | -21.2% |
Interestingly, sales of office supplies rose as many pivoted to working from home. Many parents also likely required more of these resources to home-school their children.
Restaurant
The food and beverage industry has been hard-hit by COVID-19. While many businesses turned to delivery services to stay afloat, those in fine dining were less able to rely on such a shift, and spiraled by 88.2% by May 5, 2020, year-over-year.
Feb 25, 2020 YoY Spending | May 5, 2020 YoY Change | Overall Change | |
---|---|---|---|
Casual Dining | -2.7% | -64.9% | -62.2% |
Fast Casual | 4.2% | -29.6% | -33.8% |
Fast Food | 2.0% | -20.9% | -22.9% |
Fine Dining | -18.6% | -88.2% | -69.6% |
Applebees or Olive Garden exemplify casual dining, while Panera or Chipotle characterize fast casual.
Food Delivery
Meanwhile, many consumers also shifted from eating out to home cooking. As a result, grocery delivery services jumped by over five-fold—with consumers spending a whopping 558.4% more at its April 19, 2020 peak compared to last year.
Feb. 25, 2020 YoY Spending | May 5, 2020 YoY Spending | Overall Change | |
---|---|---|---|
Food Delivery | +18.8% | +67.1% | +48.3% |
Grocery Delivery | +23.0% | +419.7% | +396.7% |
Meal/ Snack Kit | +7.0% | -5.9% | -12.9% |
Food delivery services are also in high demand, with Doordash seeing the highest growth in U.S. users than any other food delivery app in April.
Travel
While all travel categories experienced an immense decline, cruises suffered the worst blow by far, down by 87.0% in YoY spending since near the start of the pandemic.
Feb 25, 2020 YoY Spending | May 5, 2020 YoY Spending | Overall Change | |
---|---|---|---|
Airline | -7.7% | -99.1% | -91.4% |
Car Rental | -6.3% | -86.0% | -79.7% |
Cruise | -18.7% | -105.7% | -87.0% |
Hotel | -7.0% | -85.9% | -78.9% |
Airlines have also come to a halt, nosediving by 91.4% in a 10-week span. In fact, governments worldwide have pooled together nearly $85 billion in an attempt to bail the industry out.
Hope on the Horizon?
Consumer spending offers a pulse of the economy’s health. These sharp drops in consumer spending fall in line with the steep decline in consumer confidence.
In fact, consumer confidence has eroded even more intensely than the stock market’s performance this quarter, as observed when the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) is compared to the S&P 500 Index.
Many investors dumped their stocks as the coronavirus hit, but consumers tightened their purse strings even more. Yet, as the chart also shows, both the stock market and consumer sentiment are slowly but surely on the mend since April.
As the stay-at-home curtain cautiously begins to lift in the U.S., there may yet be hope for economic recovery on the horizon.
Markets
Charting Revenue: How The New York Times Makes Money
This graphic tracks the New York Times’ revenue streams over the past two decades, identifying its transition from advertising to subscription-reliant.

When it comes to quality and accessible content, whether it be entertainment or news, consumers are often willing to pay for it.
Similar to the the precedent set by the music industry, many news outlets have also been figuring out how to transition into a paid digital monetization model. Over the past decade or so, The New York Times (NY Times)—one of the world’s most iconic and widely read news organizations—has been transforming its revenue model to fit this trend.
This chart from creator Trendline uses annual reports from the The New York Times Company to visualize how this seemingly simple transition helped the organization adapt to the digital era.
The New York Times’ Revenue Transition
The NY Times has always been one of the world’s most-widely circulated papers. Before the launch of its digital subscription model, it earned half its revenue from print and online advertisements.
The rest of its income came in through circulation and other avenues including licensing, referrals, commercial printing, events, and so on. But after annual revenues dropped by more than $500 million from 2006 to 2010, something had to change.
NY Revenue By Year | Print Circulation | Digital Subscription | Advertising | Other | Total |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2003 | $623M | $1,196M | $168M | $1,987M | |
2004 | $616M | $1,222M | $165M | $2,003M | |
2005 | $616M | $1,262M | $157M | $2,035M | |
2006 | $637M | $1,269M | $172M | $2,078M | |
2007 | $646M | $1,223M | $183M | $2,052M | |
2008 | $668M | $1,068M | $181M | $1,917M | |
2009 | $683M | $797M | $101M | $1,581M | |
2010 | $684M | $780M | $93M | $1,557M | |
2011 | $659M | $47M | $756M | $93M | $1,555M |
2012 | $681M | $114M | $712M | $88M | $1,595M |
2013 | $673M | $151M | $667M | $86M | $1,577M |
2014 | $668M | $172M | $662M | $86M | $1,588M |
2015 | $653M | $199M | $639M | $89M | $1,580M |
2016 | $647M | $232M | $581M | $94M | $1,554M |
2017 | $668M | $340M | $559M | $109M | $1,676M |
2018 | $642M | $400M | $558M | $148M | $1,748M |
2019 | $624M | $460M | $531M | $198M | $1,813M |
2020 | $597M | $598M | $392M | $196M | $1,783M |
2021 | $588M | $774M | $498M | $215M | $2,075M |
2022 | $574M | $979M | $523M | $233M | $2,308M |
In 2011, the NY Times launched its new digital subscription model and put some of its online articles behind a paywall. It bet that consumers would be willing to pay for quality content.
And while it faced a rocky start, with revenue through print circulation and advertising slowly dwindling and some consumers frustrated that once-available content was now paywalled, its income through digital subscriptions began to climb.
After digital subscription revenues first launched in 2011, they totaled to $47 million of revenue in their first year. By 2022 they had climbed to $979 million and accounted for 42% of total revenue.
Why Are Readers Paying for News?
More than half of U.S. adults subscribe to the news in some format. That (perhaps surprisingly) includes around four out of 10 adults under the age of 35.
One of the main reasons cited for this was the consistency of publications in covering a variety of news topics.
And given the NY Times’ popularity, it’s no surprise that it recently ranked as the most popular news subscription.
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