“Home Is the New Normal” Also, Water Wet, Sky Up, Ground Down. Film at 11!
I love to periodically check out the dust-dry wine industry site Wine & Spirits Daily, because it’s full of all sorts of yummy ultra-dry nuggets of data, it’s like a Norwegian crisp-bread for a wine-writer’s mind. Dry nuggets like that wine sales are up 2.6% in 2009, the increase is driven entirely by wines under $15, and the biggest gainers are under $15 wines from California, Washington, Argentina, and New Zealand.
None of that is too unexpected, but the yummy dry nugget that just about knocked me out of my chair today was from Danny Brager, a VP at Nielsen, the trend-tracking-and-ratings company. Brager was explaining that there’s a general lack of consumer confidence, summarized WSD, “When consumers lack confidence, they tend to shy away from out-of-home entertainment. Increased ratings for the Food Network, higher cookbook sales (+9%) and increased traffic at food sites (+11%) show that consumers are cooking more at home.” Okay, yes, interesting. “All this has created a ‘new normal’ focused at home,” concludes Brager.
Yes, it was just reported as simple fact that in the recent past, “normal” was not at home — yet now it is.
Okie dokie, folks, that’s why I moved to the Midwest. I like me some common sense and good values. Um, dear wine-industry, home has always been normal. It was the old normal, it’s certainly it’s the new normal, and y’all need to stop working every night and visit yours. Home!
Home. Seriously. Home is the new normal. And thus concludes the frothy-credit of the 2000’s.
I also love the pseudo-scientific/sociological terms they come up with to describe our wanting to stay at home. Because apparently? Saying “staying at home” is sooooo 1999.