Vice, Vice, Baby! Americans (Ab)Use Porn, Booze, & Chocolate To Cope With Lockdown

To cope with lockdown stress, job loss, and or just being housebound and bored over the last month, millions of Americans have resorted to watching porn, drinking beer, smoking pot, and or devouring chocolate amid coronavirus lockdowns that covers at least 90% of the country, reported Reuters.

From February 24 to March 17, Pornhub recorded a 12% increase in global traffic. We noted in mid-March, the porn site offered free premium accounts to anyone in Italy as the virus crisis intensified. By the end of March, Americans were given free access to Pornhub Premium as a way to “Help Flatten the Curve.” During the month, a huge influx of coronavirus themed porn videos hit the site, as it appears amateur porn stars in quarantine had nothing else better to do. 

The love lockdown, as some are calling it, also saw people panic buying sex toys. Lingerie chain Ann Summers reported that dildos sales surged 27% in the last week of March over the same period the previous year.

For the four weeks ending March 22, dollar sales for top beer companies jumped over last year’s figures. With restaurants and bars closed, Americans panic hoarded beer, according to Brewbound. Over the period, beer sales from top brands erupted: Anheuser-Busch InBev recorded +11.6%, Molson Coors +10.6%, Constellation Brands +24%, Mark Anthony Brands +124%, Heineken USA +7.5%, Boston Beer +55.1%, Diageo +13.3, and Pabst +11.1%. 

Top hard seltzer brands, Mark Anthony’s White Claw and Boston Beer’s Truly saw triple-digit growth trends, up 363.5% and 226.1%, respectively, over the period.

If porn watching and boozing weren’t enough, Americans were self-medicating with marijuana, melting in their couches as they “Netflix and quarantined.” Flowhub said California, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska reported a 50% increase in pot sales from Mach 16-22.

As a result of the pandemic, many Americans have resorted to comfort food, such as chocolate and pizza:

“I think as you look across all of the categories, we are seeing really big increases,” Nestle USA Chairman and CEO Steve Presley recently told Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade.

Nestle not only makes chocolate products. “We have such a broad portfolio in the U.S. we see spikes across all of our businesses really with the exception being the out of home business obviously,” Presley said.

The risk many Americans have in quarantine is that they’re not exercising and living healthy lifestyles. Instead, they’re resorting to life’s vices to numb the pain of a pandemic.

And the question everyone is asking, how much longer are Americans going to be confined to their homes.

Well, the so-called Wall Street virologists at JPMorgan believe the US could be in the late accumulation phase with a possible inflection point in the coming weeks.

But as Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health recently noted in a study titled “Social distancing strategies for curbing the COVID-19 epidemic,” some form of social distancing could remain in place through 2022, which would suggest American better get used to extended lockdowns while enjoying life’s vices…