Shopping is an activity which is favourite of each one of us. It is said that many people find shopping, a way to relieve stress . But what if someone is not able to shop for months or years due to some constraints as it recently happened due to Covid -19. After an endless quarantined period and business closures, consumers faced a lot of pent-up emotions. People were quarantined for more than a year, working from home, wearing same old clothes and of course no makeup looks . After the restrictions were lifted, they were left with only solution that is – Revenge shopping.
Revenge shopping is consumers compensating for lost time by multiplying their spending. When customers participate in revenge shopping, after maintaining restraint for months, they choose to spend extravagantly on magnificient items, to make up for the “lack of luxury” they’ve experienced lately.
Today, customers all over the world are opting to buy luxury products from brands like Gucci, Hermès, and Chanel and plan expensive vacations because they’ve been unable to do either over the past 2 years due to the pandemic.
The concept of revenge shopping has already proven true in China. In the year 2020, the French brand Hermes’ Guangzhou flagship store in China reportedly did $2.7 million in sales on the day it reopened in April. This is the biggest single-day shopping at a luxury outlet of Hermes in China . Long queues, fuelled by revenge spending sprees, have been seen outside outlets of brands such as Apple, Nike, Gucci,in Chinese cities. Others luxury brands have also seen the sale surge upto 40-45% in the first two quarters of 2020 as compared to pre pandemic scenario.
But revenge against whom or what? Maybe the restrictions of lockdown, living a forced austere life have made consumers eager to jump back into spending.
It also occurs when a customer could not get access to certain goods for a period of time, suddenly now have access and consumer starts buying it impulsively.
One such example can be seen when Maggi got banned in 2015 . When it came back, it made a great entry In 2019, Nestle sold 264,000 mt of Maggi products, compared to 254,500 mt in 2014. Maggi lovers were buying or stocking Maggi just because there was a fear of missing out.
It is worth noting that millions of people have lost their jobs during covid -19 and still facing economic crisis but there is a huge chunk in society who could save more during lockdown because they could not go out and spend their earnings. After a year spent mostly indoors, with no parties to attend or hot restaurants to crowd into, people started spending exorbitantly to refresh their wardrobes, to avenge what they were denied earlier.
For instance in USA, people had excess savings worth $1.7 trillion and in France , people were able to save $66 billion during the lockdown more than usual.
Here the question arises – will India have a revenge shopping spree too? Well, India’s 1/4th population belong to middle class group and top brands generally attract high income segments or upper middle class. As and when the fear of this pandemic declines, high income segment in India will also start spending for luxuries like USA and China.
To conclude, we can say that Revenge shopping is a key driver for retailers after the pandemic and is most likely the only hope that most of them are keeping to recover from pandemic losses.
