Did COVID-19 lockdowns break your heart? It is time to take revenge!

Sheethal Devi S | Executive Member | Crowd Core Marketing Club

The conversational word or phrase “Whatever” has been voted as the most annoying word in English for more than a decade. But I guess it is time for a new ‘Most hated word in the English language’ - “Lockdown”. Phew!! Aren’t we already tired and sick of them already? Think of the pandemic as the boyfriend/girlfriend who broke your heart. It’s time to get back out there and look incredible for your new audience and potential suitors just like how Princess Diana took revenge on her unfaithful husband by wearing “The Revenge Dress”. Getting dressed up is a ritualistic rite to get over something but we have been denied during the lockdowns and, just like a breakup, we need the ceremonial catharsis by shopping. Hence we over-indulge in ‘Retail therapy’ and this phenomenon of getting revenge on something by shopping for luxury goods is called “Revenge shopping”.

The concept of Revenge shopping was first noticed in the 1980s in China when it opened the borders and let foreign brands into the state. People started shopping so much from the foreign luxury brands that they named this trend “Baofuxing Xiaofei”, which translates to “Revenge Buying”.

After this, the trend again repeated in April 2020, when the Chinese lockdowns were relaxed and people flooded to malls to buy expensive stuff to validate themselves. One particular Hermes flagship store in Guangzhou, China, reportedly did $2.7 million in sales on the day it reopened. The trend didn’t stop there; by the end of 2020, China’s overall share in the global luxury market had doubled to about 20%.

Considering the facts and figures which shows that about a third (about 33 million) of the Indian population considered to fall under the Global middle class before the pandemic, have now moved to the poor class, just one year into the pandemic. This shows that the purchasing power to indulge in luxury goods, in terms of the number of people, is far less when compared to the rest of the world. The upper-middle class and upper class segments are still in the game. Though their spending power is quite large, their numbers are so much lesser in proportion with the burgeoning middle class, and thus it is unlikely that India will witness revenge shopping.

“The concept of Revenge shopping seems to make sense only in the developed markets like the USA, Europe, China etc. The same is not quite possible to happen in India.”