The Best One Yet - BONUS: “Year in Review” — The 3 biggest trends of 2020

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

Snacks Digested: We whipped up the 3 top trends from the last year.Got a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @TBOYJack @NickOfNewYorkWant a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form:https://forms.gle/KhUAo31xmkSdeynD9Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is your Snacks Daily Year and Review bonus episode. It is Monday, December 28. This is our one podcast of the post-Christmas pre-New Year's holiday week. Full disclosure, Jack and I are taking some vacation. But like any good podcast hosts, we couldn't leave our snackers without a stocking stuffer. For today's pod, we whipped up the three biggest business trends of 2020 for you.

So we got no new servings of news today. We're going to pause and digest 2020. This is our Snacks Daily. year in review. It's also our best snacks daily yet. TBO White. Forgot to mention, it also happens to be the best one yet. First story, Jack, what do we got? House hype. House hype. Since you couldn't travel snackers, home became your ultimate travel destination. For our second story, the CWO, the chief woke officer. And when it comes to corporate social responsibility, silence no longer an option. Third and final story, Jack? The great appscape. The great appscape. You indulged by escaping into a screen.

Before we hit those three wonderful non-stories, they're actually trends. I like we did there. We actually had a wild fourth idea, which we didn't select, so we're giving an honorable mention here. Honestly, Jack and I couldn't let this one go. The fourth one, honorable mention, rise of the underdogs, rise of the underdogs. Functional companies that we used to ridicule became fashionable companies that we crave in 2020. Case and points, soup sales fell for over a decade. Jack, I used to mock Campbell's for being two-part sodium, one-part tomato soup.

But the best quote of the year came early in the pandemic from the Campbell Soup CEO. Frankly, this new soup trend of 2020, many believe not possible. We didn't believe it either, but millennials had a chef boyardee moment. After soup, we noticed Croc's sales are up 48% in 2020, even though overall footwear sales actually fell. Crox's slogan is, come as you are, which we always thought was a mantra for a shoe that you shouldn't judge by its laces. Apparently this year, millions of people saw the light, tried them on, stayed on the couch

them. The light because there's holes in the shoe, but not in the financials. All right, so we got crocs. We got Campbell soup. But get this, Snackers. Etsy is the best performing stock in the S&P 500 in 2020. Not Amazon. No, not Apple. Etsy. It's basically Amazon's alternative cousin who went to RISD. Will that make you love me, Dad? Etsy, it always sat at the kids table. Now the stock has quadrupled in just the last year. Underdogs dominated business and the markets this year, this 20th. But Jack and I said, you know what, we're going to go even further. So we ID'd three trends that are even deeper. Let's hit our three non-stories, our big trends of 2020.

You're tuned in the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way. The snacks about the hair ain't food. It's air candy. They don't reflect the views of the robberhood family. It's all informational just so. We're not recommending any securities. It's not a research report or investment advice.

Not an offer or sale of a security. Snacks is digestible, business news for you. Robberhood Financial, LLC, member Fenra slash SIPC. For our first story, we got trend number one. House hype. Home wasn't just where the heart is. It was the only place. So you turned your house into a hotel.

Yeah, you did. Jack and I jumped in snacks style here, pulled out some statistics for it. All right, pre-pandemic Jack, average American, what are they doing with that 49 hours a week? The average American spent 44 hours a week at work. and another five hours commuting to work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. All right, so let's assume you sleep eight hours a day, which no one has ever actually achieved. That means 44% of your waking hours, 44% were spent away from home working. Then 2020 happened.

Because of work from home and remote learning, your commute turned to the fridge. And that is why we saw house hype, a phenomenon where people made huge investments in their homes since they were there 24-7. Now, a whole bunch of people could not work from home, and a whole bunch people also couldn't afford to do the kind of upgrades that Jack and I are about to talk about. Yeah, essential workers have continued going to work, which is amazing. But a large number of Americans called up exhibit to pimp their cribs big time this year. So Jack and I are looking at this. The house hype situation, we thought it was going to slow in May, and then it barreled through the whole rest of the year.

When it comes to a bathroom retiling, the limit does not exist. Perfectly put, Jack. So Snackers, like all good stories, this one begins at lows. It begins with the home makeover. Salesbro's 30% in the summertime after your third kitchen remodel. And then Home Depot said, you know what? Same thing for us. Home Depot had its best quarter in 20 years.

We're talking $38 billion in just three months. And then for the really expensive people, restoration hardware stock doubled because you can get one faucet handle for $900. Jack, don't even let me get started on the sconces. All right. So first you did the home makeover. Then you realized, you know what? I got to upgrade the appliances in the other part of the house. Get this, Snackers. Baday sales? No joke. Quintupled in 2020. So after you bought the bidet, you walked across the street, went to Best Buy, where online sales more than tripled this year. With all that Disney Plus to Plus this year, you went curbside pickup to get a 4K TV and surround sound.

I check. You've been enjoying the slam and salmon dinners the last few weeks? I'm a messy eater, if that's what you're asking. It is why I'm asking, because sales of iRobot's most expensive Roombas doubled over the past nine months. With you, your partner, your significant other, your kids, your dogs, all in the house, there was a lot of cleaning up to do in 2020. All right, Snackas, he did the home makeover. You upgraded the appliances. Third and final thing here, you got to treat yourself to some delights in the home. Think Kevin McAllister at the Plaza Hotel.

Yeah, that's what you got to do. See, you layback, you get the Netflix. You get your own account this time because Netflix added 26 million subscribers in just the six months since Tiger came. was the thing. Peloton, another home delight for many. We don't have to tell you the numbers. It was their best year imaginable after a really poor IPO last year. Yeah, I remember a while, Jack. That was brutal. But Jack, full disclosure here, you want to talk about the Petapalooza surge and pet adoptions? Pet adoption spiked. Kicking it off with River, our personal profit puppy, who we adopted on March 28. Yeah, but you got to treat Fido to the imported bison. And that is why Chewy stock has

tripled so far this year. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over in house hype? You turned your house into a hotel in 2020, but we think you want an actual hotel in 2021. All that nesting, it's so much nest building. We think you channeled your innate craving for travel into your home. This year, we wanted home to feel really nice. We wanted to feel pampered. We wanted it to be less one-bedroom, 900-square-foot apartment, and more the rits. Staggers, you can't see it, but Jack's face makes a delight. shift when he says pampered. Basically what we're trying to say is you upgraded yourself to the suite. But in a post-vaccine world, post-inoculation, we think you're going to want to explore outside your

four walls once again. Think like less material, more experiences. Less living room, more Disney's Epcot Center. Honestly, there are only so many cent of candles you can even fit on your shelf anyway. And we're still waiting for a pure play succulent stock. For our second story, we got trend number two, corporate social responsibility went from extracurricular, non-essential, to kind of an absolute must. We think companies need a chief woke officer because no comment is no longer an option. 2020 was honestly one of the most divisive years in American history. We had major civil unrest after the murders of unarmed black people and a really ugly presidential election. And then you had 300,000 people losing their lives to coronavirus, which also disproportionately affected those minorities.

And because of climate change, we had our worst wildfire season in California history. Jack and I recorded a pod back in September. Literally, outside my window in San Francisco, we were recording while it was orange out the entire day. Much of the west of the United States was on fire for months of this year. All right, so with all that going on, we didn't see that much of a response from the government to any of it that directly. At the federal level, we saw pretty much nothing. Yeah, but what we did see was corporations shifting how they viewed their societal responsibility.

Basically, from silence to action. And the first issue we saw this was with racial equality. And the company that really defined this was J.P. Morgan Chase, which pledged a massive, get this, $30 billion to fight the racial wealth gap. In the wake of the George Floyd killing, we saw 58 of the Fortune 100 companies pledge money to support racial equality causes. But here's what's wild about the Chase number. Chase's pledge made up 90% of that amount. That's insane. We all We also saw a whole bunch of other CEOs and founders donate money and resources to historically black colleges and universities, nonprofits, and other racial justice initiatives. All right, so that's what we saw on the racial justice side. But then we saw things go even deeper on the equality and diversity in the workplace side. Remember, NASDAQ is basically the bouncer to the stock market, and they made big moves to force board diversity. All right, here's the latest rule from NASDAQ. You got to have at least one woman on your board and one racial minority.

or someone who identifies as LGBTQ. If you don't, you awkwardly have to explain why. And if you don't change your ways after a couple of years, you got to play somewhere else. That's right. You can't trade on NASDAQ if you're not fitting the diversity rule we just mentioned. The third major societal issue that companies are acting on is global warming in the environment.

Oh, Jack, you got to love what they're doing over in Puget Sound. Did we pronounce that right? Good call. That is it. That's the body of lot. The French student in me always thinks Puget. Microsoft just one up to Amazon. and carbon negative. Amazon started it with their own climate pledge, pledging to be carbon neutral by 2050 by breeding a stampede of 100,000 electric delivery vans. Microsoft's like,

hey, cute kid over there. Microsoft instead is going to stay carbon negative until all the carbon that it has ever emitted since 1975 is destroyed from the atmosphere. Wow. Some companies are eliminating future carbon emissions. Others are paying back all of their past carbon debts. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over in corporate America hiring CWOs? Wokeness will become a line item on the balance sheet. Snackers, going forward, quarterly earnings reports, they're not going to start with your typical like top line revenue numbers. That's what we're thinking. Revenues and profits have always been the first thing CEOs talk about, but we think they're going to talk about social issues first and let the CFO

handle profits in the second category. And then the CEOs are going to take it a step further. They're going to start tying compensation to those social goals. Oh, we haven't boosted a diversity on our board? Nope. No bonus for any of us. Jack, not happening. Silence those snackers. It's no longer an option for these companies because business is no longer about just maximizing profits. Companies are now expected to act when the government doesn't. For our third and final story, we got our third trend here. To flatten the curve and stop the spread, Americans avoided socializing the entire year, pretty much. Sheltering in place at home, we embraced the great appscape. The great appscape.

Snackers, your routines, your daily rituals, the weekend rendezvous all got destroyed by the pandemic. Nick, Friday night, queer eye viewing party. You win? Sold, in, done. Sorry, it's canceled. Jack, the softball team with the ironic corporate office name. You gotta love it. Snacks on first. Snacks on first. Disbanded, done. Not happening right now.

Your annual street reunion for the guys from the Milliken Fifth Floor at Middlebury College sophomore year. You look forward to it every year, Jack. Turned out this year to just be a half-hour Zoom meeting. All right. So for millions of us Snackers, you found escape. You got to find escape after all this was canceled. And you found it through your screens, specifically your smallest screens. And you use these small screens to better yourself.

What Jack and I noticed was that the self-betterment was happening and it was happening through your smartphone. How many people, please raise your hand, have had a New Year's resolution to start journaling or meditating? Nine years running. It's a great one. You've got to have it every year. Well, 2020. was the perfect opportunity with the burnout, the anxiety.

Meditation app, Com was a big winner in 2020. Com had like multiple fundraisers, hit a $2 billion valuation this past year. And Masterclass and Duolingo were big winners. They raised a bunch of venture capital money because you finally started to crack the Polish language this year. All right, it's like after a while, you're getting tired of, you know,

conjugating the subjunctive on Espanio. So you know what? You're going to entertain yourself through that screen, not just self-better yourself. We deserve it. We're entitled to a little bit of binging at the end of the day. Yeah, you totally are, Jack. So you're probably spending 30 bucks a month these days, what would you say?

More than you did last year on Disney Plus, HBO Max, Netflix, and the whole gang? I am close to subscription. Or you may have turned to recently legalized sports betting apps. Yeah, for example, Penn National Gaming's Barstool or Fan Duel or Draft Kings, all directly or indirectly, publicly traded stocks. Or maybe you snatched up one of those Nintendo Switches, which are still selling by the millions to play some video games now. All right, so after the self-betterment, a little bit of entertainment,

you needed to socialize a bit, and you still socialized through those same tiny screens. Kind of. In the last year, TikTok became the fastest growing app in social media. History, Jack, wasn't even a thing in 2019. And dating apps, we thought they were going to get crushed because physically meeting a person was a health hazard, and yet match group stock is at a record high right now.

It doesn't make any sense because in quarantine, you are forced to go someone. Yes, but these apps created virtual parties where you could virtually fall in love at first sight through a spontaneous bump in. But then finally, Snackers, maybe he started investing through screens as like a way of investing in yourself. Stock markets tanked in March, but Nick, the S&P 500 is up 66% since March 23rd. All right, a wild stat here, Jack and I found. About 10 million people participated in that resurgence by investing in stocks for the very first time. Robin Hood. Media Trade, Charles Schwab, E-Trade had huge growths in investing customers this year.

And full disclosure, Snackers, this is a Robin Hood podcast. So, Jack, what is our takeaway for our buddies over in the great appescape? These are accelerated trends that we do not think will be undone. Get this wild stat, Snackers. All right. In the past 10 years, shopping through screens like your basic e-commerce, that has grown from 5% to 15% of all U.S. retail sales, That was from 2009 to 2019, but in 2020 alone, now the number is up to 30% of total retail spending. That's right, e-commerce has doubled its share of entire U.S. retail sales. It's not just e-commerce. Also, cord cutting.

Yep. Dating out. Check. These were existing trends that simply whipped up into a higher gear this year. So the big question, Jack and I are asking going into 2021, is which consumer behaviors are going to refer back to the old behaviors? Or which will stay like they were in 2020 when screens provided us the great app scape. Jack, can you whip up the trend takeaways for us over there? The first was house hype.

Stuck at home, we invested big in our homes. So Jack and I think human desire for exploration is going to return even bigger post-COVID. Our second trend is the chief woke officer. Corporations took action this year when the government wouldn't. Just like profits, social goals, now a must. For our third and final trend, the great. app scape. We escaped our shelter in place through our tiny screens. We found some existing trends and then we accelerated them. Blew them out of the water in 2020. Now, time for our

snack fact of the day. This one tweeted in by Alex Hughes in lovely Memphis Tennessee. Alex agrees that Chicago does logistics. He's not arguing. That's good. That's good. He agrees. We were going to face, there's going to be some backlash here. But Alex points out Memphis does logistics too. Yeah, it turns out that FedEx's headquarters are there. And Memphis actually has the biggest cargo airport in the Western Hemisphere second only to Hong Kong. Memphis also has the headquarters of International Paper, which happens to be the largest pulp and paper company in the world. All right, so we add up this little double snack fact here. That means they supply the largest part of Amazon's cardboard boxes. Therefore, if so facto,

international paper does. So Memphis could rival Chicago in terms of doing logistics. Jack, I feel like we just started something here. There's attention here now. Snackers, the fifth and final theme of the year, you looked fantastic. Next Monday, we are going to drop our 2021 predictions podcast. It's going to be a good one. In the meantime, follow us at Robin Hood Snacks or subscribe to the Robin Hood Snacks newsletter. And you can always keep in touch with me at T-Boy Jack on social. And me at Nick of New York.

If you know, you know. And before we go, big happy birthday to Ronnie Joshi in Voorhees, New Jersey. And happy birthday to Mary Byrne Milburn in Dallas, Texas. and Orion in Newark Delaware and Liberty Fleming in Boise, Idaho.