Shopping by Proxy

Times are tough.  Escapism is rising. As with all depressions, movie attendance is up, Hulu actually has a shot at beating Youtube at its own game, and alcohol sales are up, as are random hook-ups.  We can see the trend on TV: two years ago, the prime-time dreck centered around bling and fabulous homes and even more fabulous lives of the fabulous people that live in them.  Now, that same focus on the rich is there, but it’s gotten nasty: they’re being shown as the bunch of back-biting vapid rodents that they are.  I am not going to expand much on that, because you already know your favorite rodent shows that you watch every week.

Here’s the question: spending is down, and escapism is up– do those two factors translate into higher ’shopping by proxy’?  Do you find yourself spending more time online, “researching” products?  Do you use this research time as a methadone substitute to your normal online shopping habit?  My thesis was that page views on shopping sites would be higher, as people spend more time browsing around, but not necessarily buying anything.  So far, my thesis is half-right:

Discounters like ebay and Walmart are up, as is the unstoppable ruthlessly efficient Amazon (which I hate and admire at the same time, like Ash did in the first Alien):

But overall page views are the same, or slightly down.  Page views have steadily declined as site navigation becomes more efficient, and as buyers decrease, less people go through the shopping cart, which also brings down the average– but the point is that people simply aren’t window shopping on the intarwebs like everyone thinks:

Perhaps the time-wasting website traffic is up?  Are we filling our time photoshopping domo-kun and pictures of Kim Jong Il? Nope– flat, with the only gain coming from hulu (likely due to their very expensive ad campaign).

So, what is everyone doing all night?  I hate to postulate, but in the end, I think TeeVee will win the day.  It may come in through our desktops instead of home theatres, but professionally written stories with good-looking people will beat mindless cartoons and witty political banter discussion threads for the vast majority of us.