Covid-19 Daily Bulletin 20/05: Shopping Struggles and Tech Repairs

Time to dust off the Commodore 64.

Welcome back to our daily bulletin. Today we’re looking at difficulties around shopping and how people are looking to old tech under lockdown.

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Shopping woes ease, but is trouble on the horizon?

The Covid-19 pandemic brought with it an endless list of problems for the people of the world. A major one was the sudden inability to buy the products that were normally easy to pick up.

Disrupted supply chains, stockpiling, and closed businesses have all played their part, not to mention the fads driven by social media that have caused flour and yeast shortages.

At a time when people are stuck indoors due to lockdowns, often with kids, having a fully stocked house has been more important than ever. We wanted to find out how bad this issue is, and if it’s getting better or worse.

Using Qriously, we’ve been surveying thousands of adults from around the world every week. We’ve asked them about their spending habits and whether they’ve had any issues ticking off the items on their usual shopping list.

Here’s what we’ve found out.

At first glance the situation is improving. From our first survey to our most recent, we’ve seen a significant drop (from 41% to 26%) in people having trouble buying the things they normally would.

While this fall is obviously a good thing, it doesn’t change the fact that over a quarter of people are still having problems.

We hope the downwards trend continues, but as countries face serious economic troubles, jobs dry up, and companies shut their doors, doing a normal shop might become both an issue of supply and of having the money to spend.

We can also see a very mixed picture when we break this down by country. Here’s the data from our four most recent surveys.

The downward trend is visible in most countries, although it’s starker in some more than others.

For example, in the UK it’s fallen by 9% since the survey four weeks ago, while in Italy it’s fallen by just 1%.

For Spain, the % is at the same place it was four surveys ago, but in intervening surveys it saw consecutive rises. Luckily these have now fallen away.

The USA also stands out. While the downward trend is evident, their numbers are far higher than any other country we surveyed. Currently 46% of respondents say they’re having trouble doing their regular shop, with the next highest country being the UK at 34%.

That nearly 50% of Americans are still struggling to shop normally two months into the pandemic is cause for concern. Not only does it mean people can’t get what they need, but that businesses must be taking a significant hit too.

Doing it for themselves

This week we’re investigating the rise in people repairing their own household items and tech gadgets during lockdown.

Google Trends shows searches for ‘how to fix ___’ are more common now than they have been in the last five years.

But what are people looking to repair? And what’s with the urgency?

Our Consumer Research platform found tech items are the products which people are discussing repairing themselves most. There were 636k mentions in March and April, up 30% from January and February.

It wasn’t unusual in the before-times for consumers to fix their own gadgets, as we can see from average mention volumes in 2018 and 2019.

In fact, at the beginning of 2020 consumers seemed to have turned their backs on fixing their own devices. April changed things. Because of lockdown, consumers couldn’t just drop off their product for repair anymore.

The top-discussed DIY tech repairs are:

Replacing broken screens (112k mentions)
Computer or laptop repair (74k)
Reinstalling software on computers (41k)

There is a lot of confusion on social media about how consumers can get their gadgets fixed because of lockdown measures. For example, there were 22k mentions requesting advice on how to get a professional phone screen replacement.

There were also complaints from consumers that the price had skyrocketed or the turnaround time was too long. But looking at positive conversation, 17k people praised one tech firm for lowering their phone repair fees.

Mentions of home and household item repairs increased by a modest 14% in March and April (compared to January and February), as people became hesitant of outsiders entering their home. Sinks and toilets were the most commonly discussed items needing repair in the home with 15k mentions each. These were followed by showers and baths, with 11k mentions together.

It’s not clear exactly why bathrooms are the focus for home repairs at the moment. Perhaps it’s just that they’re getting more use while people aren’t going to work or school. As for tech, it’s easy to see why consumers get frustrated when items like phones and computers break – they’re the only things connecting us to the outside world right now.

It will be interesting to see if consumers continue this ‘make do and mend’ behavior as isolation is eased.

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Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team

Digital Consumer Intelligence

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