Consumer habits after lockdown

The Bottom Line

BBC

Personal Journals, Business, Society & Culture

4.6 • 615 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What have you learned about yourself in lockdown? What is it you crave, what have you found you barely miss? Evan Davis and guests contemplate life after lockdown and changing consumer habits. A surge in the sale of bikes, toilet roll panic buying, and flour flying off the supermarket shelves. Will these consumer habits stick? Have we learned to value other things in life than shopping? Or will we just want to borrow and spend at the first possible opportunity?

Guests:

Kate Ancketill, founder and CEO, GDR Creative Intelligence Richard Walker, managing director, Iceland Foods Jonathan Cole, managing director, Velorution Kate Nicholls, chief executive, UK Hospitality

Producer: Lesley McAlpine

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:05.0	Hello and welcome to the programme.
0:08.1	The words, it's too soon to say, trip off the tongue very easily because often it is too
0:13.6	soon to say.
0:14.9	But that's not going to stop us in this series of the bottom line as we ask, where will
0:19.5	business and the economy be at the end of
0:22.3	the COVID pandemic crisis? Now, today more specifically, we're thinking about consumer behavior,
0:28.6	how we will change. Will some newly acquired habits become entrenched? And for this program,
0:35.0	think of the question in two parts, really. There's the medium term before any
0:39.5	vaccine, herd immunity or cure to COVID is found. There will likely be an element of social distancing.
0:46.2	So we will definitely have to change. People have called this a new normal, but we hope it won't be
0:51.1	forever. Because then there is the long term in which we hope to vanquish the virus.
0:56.0	At that point, we can move back to more of the old normal,
0:59.6	but we still need to ask whether there will be durable effect to the pandemic.
1:03.5	And we should look for ways in which consumers may not return to life as it was before.
1:08.9	So medium term and long term.
1:13.6	But to get us going, let's start by hearing about a striking change to our buying habits. Now this is Jonathan Cole, the managing director of
1:19.2	Velaruchin, the urban bike company, which has four shops in London. So since March 23rd and the lockdown,
1:30.8	we've seen bike sales accelerate month on month as more and more people want to use electric bikes and urban bikes. This isn't the traditional
1:36.5	cycle market. This isn't people who are going out in Lycra on drop handlebars. These are
1:42.0	people who want comfortable and easy to ride vehicles where
1:47.1	they're sitting upright and they can take in the environment around them. And also, certainly with
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.