The COVID-19 virus has had a massive economic impact, crashing the stock market, canceling numerous events and putting millions of people out of work. But it’s also helped some markets.
Video communication applications like Zoom have seen massive increases in users, and the toilet paper market is booming. Perhaps most strangely, Walmart has been selling a lot more shirts — but not pants.
This change, CNN reports, is likely due to the high volume of people now working from home, and needing professional clothes to wear at home — but only from the waist up.
That’s right, all the memes about wearing pajama pants with your tie and button-down while you video conference in to a professional meeting, they’re true — so true they’re having a quantifiable impact on sales.
“In one of your previous segments you were talking about people with Zoom, and doing those types of conferencing: We’re seeing increased sales in tops, but not bottoms. So, people who are concerned, obviously, from the waist up,” Dan Bartlett, the executive vice president of corporate affairs at Walmart, shared during a Yahoo! Finance Live session, along with some additional unique revelations on Thursday about how social distancing has impacted the retailer’s sales.
Walmart is predicting a 3% annual increase this year in profits, Bartlett told Yahoo! Finance, and while the biggest increase is in household products like toilet paper, they’ve also seen a huge increase in arts and crafts and home entertainment sales.