If you enhanced your work day last year with a glass of wine or a beer hidden just out of sight on your Zoom calls, you were hardly alone. Day drinking and virtual happy hours were as much a part of the pandemic as grocery store rushes on toilet paper and the Tiger King.
But a funny thing happened as we pickled our livers last year. We didn’t do as much drunk shopping as we have the past few years.
A new study by the personal finance website Finder.com says Americans collectively spent $21.6 billion on drunk purchases over the past 12 months. That’s down considerably from the past three years.
How big a drop are we talking? It’s nearly 52% less than the previous year’s $44.9 billion. In 2018, we spent $39.4 billion. And in 2017, the total was $30.4 billion.
Why the drop? Finder didn’t delve too deeply into that, but the loss of income many households faced seems a likely candidate.
What the site did look at was who was spending the most—and it was Millennials who were the most prone to drunk shopping, with 36.5% of those surveyed saying they had drunk shopped. (Baby Boomers were a sedate 8%. Gen Z came in at 29.7% and Gen X was 26.5%.)
Some 21.4% of the people surveyed admitted to shopping while they were under the influence. Extrapolate that to the country’s population at large and it’s nearly 71 million intoxicated American shoppers. (With pandemic protocols in effect, most of that shopping presumably happened online, though Finder’s survey isn’t explicit about which retail channels the tipsy spenders used.)
Food, not surprisingly, was the most frequently purchased item among the inebriated. Nearly 80% of the people who admitted to drunk shopping said they had bought something to keep a rumbly tummy at bay. Other popular items included apparel (including shoes, clothing and accessories) at 60% and cigarettes at 58.6%.
For some, a couple of beers or shots led to a visit to gambling sites. Over half the people—53.6%—said they had gambled while intoxicated.
Overall, it was men who did the most of the drunk shopping—28.6% versus 15% of women. On average, people spent $423.73 for the year on tipsy purchases, a steep drop from the previous year’s $768.58.