• Consumer behaviour during the pandemic

Statistics Canada, the other day, released some numbers showing the impact the pandemic is having on consumer habits and, man, it is like those folks hid a camera somewhere inside our place.

Some of the nationwide trends they noted were entirely predictable.

For example, for the week ending April 11 — which is the time frame for all of the figures in this column — sales of hand sanitizers increased 345 per cent over the same week a year earlier, while sales of masks and gloves climbed by 114 per cent.

Reflecting the global wash-your-hands-mantra, soap sales rose 68 per cent from a year ago. Underscoring that toilet paper hoarding isn't dead yet in this country, sales of bathroom tissue increased by 81 per cent.

Fear of a disruption in a food chain seems as strong as ever, according to the Statistics Canada numbers.

I say this because sales of stuff with a long shelf life — like canned vegetables, up 47 per cent for the relevant week from a year earlier, and pasta, a 49 per cent increase — continued to climb.

My wife and I are part of that trend.

Despite assurances from the national grocery chains that they will continue to keep us fed, our shelves are full of boxes of spaghetti, cans of crushed tomatoes, and bottles of pasta sauce, just as they sag with bags of rice, sales of which are up 12 per cent nationally, according to the national statistical agency.

I recently poured a herniainducing sack of flour into a storage bin. No surprise there: indicative of the pandemic baking that we hear so much about, flour sales were up 81 per cent across the country during the relevant week in April.

We are also personally doing our part to push up booze sales, which rose 46 per cent nationwide during April 5-11, a period during which sales of coffee filters rose 68 per cent across the country.

We actually use a French press. But fear of running out of caffeinated fuel is such that we never have less than a couple of big cans of ground coffee on hand, with a bag or two of beans somewhere, just in case.

Some of the numbers require a leap of logic. My guess is that the 47 per cent drop in sales of cut flowers on the week of Good Friday speaks to the state of romance in the time of lockdown.

But I have no idea why sales of ham, of all things, were down 13 per cent from the year before.

Some things within the research, although making perfect sense, have no relevance to my life: the the 33 per cent slump in cosmetic products; the 75 per cent rise in spending on hair colouring potions, which are neither here nor there to a man who has come to terms with his silvery tuft.

My feeling is that when I look back at what the pandemic did to my spending habits, it will mostly be about how I did not spend my money.

No take-out Thai, and after work brewskis. No dashes to the newsstand and book store. No cabs, concerts or movies.

No haircuts, which, consequently, mean my coif is now reaching skyward, as if I had been zapped by a lightning bolt.

I could, at any point, catch my image in a mirror and, startled, decide enough is enough. But for now I have chosen to ride it out, because a pandemic seems to be the time for such gambles.

So, it is with my clothes, which, even before the plague began, had that locked-down look.

Now, I seldom leave the house. The closest I get to friends or co-workers is a grainy Zoom call where I'm pretty much only visible from the shoulders up.

In my view, I'm now beyond matters of style; during the pandemic perhaps we all are.

The presence of my wife, a figure of style and grace even in the midst of these strange times, keeps me from descending into complete dilapidation.

But I don't envision buying new togs for a long time yet. Who needs to? It's a pandemic lockdown. For a change, I'm on the fashion vanguard.