cheese subscription from Neal’s Yard Dairy
or you are wondering when your quarterly delivery from the London Sock Exchange will turn up. Freddie’s Flowers (“I’m like the milkman but with flowers”) had 60,000 active customers in March 2020 before the first lockdown for its weekly flower subscription; one year on, it had more than 110,000 regulars and a turnover of £30.3m.
This goes against the grain of what economists might anticipate. Faced with a precarious financial outlook, you would imagine we would become cautious, trim any unnecessary expenditure (and it might be a stretch to justify cheese or flowers as essential purchases). In fact, the little dopamine pop of retail therapy has been hard to resist for many of us during the past year. According to research by Barclaycard, Britain is now “a nation of super subscribers”, spending £323m in 2020 on digital and subscription services, an increase of 39.4% on the previous year. The average household now has seven contracts and it might be worth keeping an eye on the mission creep in your bank account: men typically spend £57 a month (£684 a year); women on average outlay £35 each month (£420 annually).