The upcoming train of pent-up demand

                                         [Railroad track with clouds in the distance*]

Worldwide, the corona virus has shut down almost all businesses, big and small, and hit the income of almost workers, salaried and independent. In regards to the day after, when social and business activity is allowed to fully restart, the latter group, the independents, are especially worried. While it is difficult to accurately predict the future, one concept seems relevant in regards to forecast for the short-term future: pent up demand. It is clear that certain professionals will be extremely busy for months to come.

Accountants, doctors and attorneys always finds a way to profit. Given the need to take advantage of the various government support programs and their complexity, accountants will be quite busy and even gain new customers. Their cousins, the financial service providers, will be active helping people manage their debt and get into more debt. On the medical side, the stress of these months on everybody, not just healty care workers, will be boom of those doctors that treat the effects of it, including dermotologists, alergists, cardiologists, dentists, psychologists and psychiatrists, as if their clientelle was not large enough already. However, the lawyers will enjoy the greatest boom. Whether handing divorce, estates, breach of contract or payment issues, the courts are going to be busy. Jewish mothers knew something when they wanted their children to enter these professions.

The busiest service providers, at least in the short term, will be in the beauty care industry. Tens of millions of women will not have had a proper heart cut, dyeing, manicure, pedicure, injection or skin treatment for months. To clarify, I do not state that in derision but in appreciation of their need and its impact on those that provide this service. In fact, it is possible that these businesses will more than make up for the lost income. I also expect to prices to rise in these industries as many women will not want to wait an additional month for an appointment.

To misapply Newton’s 3^rd law of motion, every action has an equal but opposite action. After several months of no serious physical exercise or social activity, people are going to go extreme on sport and going out. The gyms, sports centres and country clubs are going to be jammed the minute such activity is considered safe. Many people will feel the absolute requirement to lose the kilos (or pounds) that they gained while stuck at home. It is unclear how long these people will maintain their enthusiasm but demand for such services will be initialy very strong. Cafes, bars and sports stadiums will be also be packed. These places represent the polar opposite of being stuck at home: lots of noise, talk, non-family and vicarious pleasure. The coffee or beer may the same but everything else is different. Vive la difference! Flights probably will  be packed as people travel to see their “long-lost” loved ones. Any professional involved this social approaching will gain.

Time will tell if how correct these predictions are. Clearly, for some independents, the return to the “good old days” before the corona device will take time, possibly years.  For others, the shutdown period will be an unpleasant but short hickup in their business development, even a shot in the arm. It is the challenge of independents to figure the route of the recovery train and somehow catch it.

* For the sake of the millions of blind, always post a description of your picture.

Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/Larisa-K-1107275/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=163518">Larisa Koshkina</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=163518">Pixabay</a>

Sports Overdosing

Sports are part of any culture.  Organized athletics have represented an important vicarious experience in most countries, affecting their very rhythm of life.  Whether it is Olympic games in ancient Greece, hippodrome activities in the Roman world, or the ups and down of the modern football season in Europe, people feel the seasons through the existence or absence of sport.

In the United States, due to the prolonged sports seasons, an extreme situation has occurred.  At this moment, in early October, all four of the major team sports are active, specifically baseball (postseason), American football, basketball (preseason), and hockey.  On any given night now, the fan can watch a live game from morning to night or, even worse, have to make a difficult choice on which sports to watch.  For example, last Sunday, I had to choose whether to watch my Pirates (baseball) or Bengals (football). 

This is like going to the store to buy fruit and finding fresh oranges, peaches, apricots, grapes, and cherries.  Once upon a time, every season had its fruit and vegetables, for example potatoes and oranges in the winter and lettuce and strawberries in the summer.  Today, in American stores, the only marker of the season is the price – a bit higher in the offseason.

Likewise, every season had its team sport – baseball in the summer, college football in the fall, and basketball and hockey in the winter.  Today, those poor athletes seem to barely get three months off while we fans are constantly in a state of overexcitement.

So, if you are in a country that does not import fruit and vegetables from the other hemisphere and has one or two major sports played at different times, consider yourself lucky.  You feel the ebbs and flows of the passing of the year, rejoicing with every seasonal rediscovery instead of being constantly bombarded with excitement and becoming, paradoxically, blasé from overexposure to good things.  

Sporty Shibboleths

An example of a Hebrew root in English, a shibboleth is a word that only natives can say properly and thus identify themselves as friend and not an enemy.  Examples of shibboleths include the pronunciations of the words coax and Williamette (river).  Electrical people say co-ax, not coax while Oregonians say wil-lam-it, with accent on the second syllable.  On a practical note, during the Battle of the Bulge, American soldiers asked questions about baseball to discover which of the MP’s were actually dressed up German soldiers.  For these Germans, a simple question about who played center field for the Yankees proved that they were imposters, just as in the biblical story of saying the word shibboleth.

In fact, the understanding and appreciation of a certain sport is a cultural portal never passed by many immigrants even after decades of residence in a country.  These sports include baseball in America and Japan primarily, cricket in England and its colonies, petanque in France, sumo wrestling in Japan, and biathlon in the Scandinavian countries, to name a few.

Not all sports are so localized.  Football, soccer in America, has taken root everywhere.  It is hard to find a country that does not have a national football team, however incompetent.  American football shares enough with its distant cousins, rugby and Aussie football, to be understood by a wide variety of people.  Also, its basic attraction, crude violence, is universally appreciated.  The relatively simple rules of basketball as well as its ability to be played by people of all ages have made that sport a successful import to most countries. 

The telling sign of a sport-culture shibboleth is the demographics of its avid spectators.  Looking over a crowd of 50,000 people at a U.S. baseball game or U.K. cricket match, it would be safe to assume that vast majority of the people grew up in that country or another country where the game was played.  The number of late converts is probably extremely limited.  They have better things to do with their time, which means that they are simply not completely native.  That is the magic of a shibboleth.