It’s a good time to sell chocolate. Or, at least those were the words recently quoted by Kevin Gould, spokesman for the Chocolate Society. But, Mr. Gould has a point, sales in chocolate are currently up by 15% as ‘an affordable treat’ is high on the list of consumer priorities. 

Curious? Well it Gets Stranger

Cinemas, enduring a long decline since the halcyon days of the 1970’s, are enjoying a welcome revival. The £5.50 to £10.50 that the average attendee is willing to part with for a ticket, not to mention the same amount again for food and drink, is proving a tempting offer for the fiscally concerned citizen seeking a dose of escapism. Take-away pizzas, too, are enjoying boom-times as sales grow at a rate that defies all economic pessimism.

‘But!’, you scoff, ‘Those aren’t cheap items!’. Indeed they’re not. But they’re selling very well.

Allow Us To Explain

Cinemas, chocolate and pizza are comfort goods and can thank their current success to human anxiety. It may seem illogical to spend more on luxuries during less affluent times, but such behaviour is not a recent anomaly and has been observed before. Other industries are bucking the downward trend and rising above the recession. These are inferior products, and we use that term in the economic sense. Cheaper, second-choice services are enjoying a traditional recession-driven revival. McDonald’s is serving 7% more customers, Butlins 9%. This is completely logical. If you want to spend less, you buy something of less apparent quality.

However, a third trend is being revealed by the current recession; a method of maintaining output that has been unavailable to the firms of previous crises. This is, of course, the phenomenon of online sales.

Internet sales are increasing as traditional offline sales decrease. Marks & Spencer lost 7.1% of offline sales in 2008, while online increased by 29%. The Next brand increased online sales by 2%, while their offline sales shed 7%. House of Fraser, Ocado, John Lewis and Sainsbury’s all reported online increases of between 27% and 150% over the Christmas period, all of which outshined the increasingly limp offline figures.

For further proof, take the example of Woolworths, that high-profile casualty of the modern downturn. As the shop collapsed and began to swiftly vanish from high streets across the nation, the Barclay brothers bought and launched the brand online, in an experiment that may well have started a new chapter in the history of consumerism. The Shop Direct Group, as the Barclays’ online arm is known, claims to have doubled its profits in the past year. An explosion of sales has allowed it to buy up the influential Woolworths brand, at a time when other firms are concerned about their own survival, and certainly not looking to expand. Without the support of Shop Direct, Woolworths would no longer exist. Now it is part of a group that has the resources to maintain its name and resurrect it as a profitable enterprise.

We’re likely to see a lot more firms avoiding extinction by turning to the online market. The U.S. media is famously struggling to cope with a decline in advertising revenue, with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer having ended its 146 consecutive years of publication this month and even the New York Times anxiously operating under debts of over $400m. But, whereas twenty years ago the Post-Intelligencer would already be consigned to the history books, it now exists as a purely online enterprise. It’s smaller and, some would say, a shadow of its former self, but it’s still standing and it may rise again in less harsh times.

Online sales are giving hope to those caught unbalanced by the current crisis, and unprecedented profit to those who were prepared to sidestep the recession and embrace a flourishing alternative market.

If you think your firm can sell well on the internet, offering attractive deals for products that appeal to individuals and families in need of affordable comforts, then you stand on the brink of an historic opportunity and there has never been a better time to develop the online side of your business, it may just lead to a brighter future than you imagine.