Americans Are Still Really Into Their Hobbies
Spending data show that games, sports and reading continue to be more popular than before the pandemic. Cooking eggs and taking mass transit, not so much.
Commission-free stock trading — a pandemic pastime — makes costs faced by retail investors less transparent.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Covid-19 pandemic transformed consumer behavior worldwide, with Americans in particular cooking a lot more, watching streamed entertainment, drinking, gardening, fixing up their houses and enjoying their new boats and recreational vehicles, among other things.
Which changes have stuck? The ones involving recreation, mainly. These are still early post-pandemic days, and there’s probably still so-called revenge spending on categories like foreign travel that will fade eventually. But it does seem as if people have decided that certain hobbies and amusements are much more important to them than they thought they were in February 2020. Included is the amusing hobby of, uh, commission-free stock trading.