Decade After COVID: Employees, Business, Consumers 🚀

Covid has changed the way we live and work in ways that will alter our behaviour long after the pandemic subsides. Work went remote, companies moved to digital models, and shopping and entertainment went online. The pandemic has literally revolutionised workers, businesses and consumers. 

Now the world is reopening. So here's a few colourful graphs - a compilation of the over 20 researches conducted by McKinsey, Reuters and Pew - on how the pandemic may reshape the future of business, work, and consumerism. 

Let's start with Business
According to a McKinsey Institute Analysis, by 2030 growth is likely to be concentrated in high-wage industries such as healthcare, law, green energy, and STEM professions. Naturally, there's a growing demand for workers in these professions. Additionally, some 35% of survey respondents said they would need more workers skilled in automation, digital, AI, and robotics, a reflection of the increased deployment of automation during COVID-19.

Meanwhile, demand for many other occupations may decline through 2030, including customer service, sales positions, food service jobs, and office support roles. The disruption is likely to have the biggest impact on low-wage jobs that have served as a safety net for displaced workers in the past.

As a result, more that 100 million workers across the eight countries studied in the survey will require drastic shifts in occupation by 2030. 

A survey of more than 2000 work activities across 800 professions found that 20-25% of the workforce in advanced economies like Germany, US, UK, and Japan (with access to hi-tech) have a higher potential of shifting their workforce to hybrid WFH models.

Spending declined up to 26% in the initial months of the pandemic in the US, Western Europe, and Asia, mostly because many low-income workers lost their jobs. However, high-income families who could work remotely saw their savings rise as expenditure on travel, entertainment and dining dried up. Savings rates spiked 10-20% in Asia, US and Western Europe, leaving many households in a strong position to spend after the pandemic.

So while consumer spending as a whole is set to rebound, the recovery is likely to be uneven. Asia alone, with 55% of households in the upper-middle category, will emerge as the largest global consumer through the decade, making up 50% of the global consumption growth. Reason? Falling poverty rates, rising incomes, shrinking family sizes, and more women earning more money. Wishing the US and Western Europe also recovery will be skewed in favour of high-income groups.

Marketplace's user numbers soared during the pandemic. Zuckerberg recently revealed that Marketplace (launched in 2016) now has more than one billion global users, up from a reported 800 million in 2018. The reasons, as experts have pointed out, are manifold. 

1. Decluttering: For the last year and a half, a lot of people have been stuck in their homes surrounded by their clutter, looking at it every day and thinking 'what don't I need?' Guess that's what home life does to you. 
2. Sustainability: The pandemic was a time when people became money conscious (courtesy salary cuts/job losses). As a result, there's been a surge in sustainable shopping and finding joy in "unique" (second-hand) items. 
3. Extra Income: For some people, the pandemic has helped turn a hobby of selling second-hand clothing into a career. For example, 27-year-old Lapoze McTribouy from UK had been selling her pre-owned clothes online on-and-off since 2013. But after losing her job, she turned her side-hustle into a business. 
4. Charity: Since the pandemic, there appears to have been a big rise in people giving away clothes, footwear and toys via websites and apps to those who can't afford them anymore. 

Marketplace isn't the only site whose user base inflated through the pandemic. According to a report released by eBay, more than two-thirds of UK users had started selling pre-owned goods on the site in 2020 to earn extra cash. And Depop (acquired by Etsy last month) now has reportedly over 30 million global users.

Of course, not all of Musk’s whimsies land him in Court, but many don’t pan out precisely as planned. So here's a rundown on Elon Musk's biggest hits and misses of the last five years. 

• TikTok employees in US, UK, and Ireland to return to work three days a week from August. 
• 9 employees at Nebraska Burger King resigned by writing 'We All Quit. Sorry for the Inconvenience' on the restaurant's billboard.
• Music festival in Holland, held in early July, leads to 1000+ COVID infections. 
• Video games on Netflix soon - company hires former EA and Oculus executive to start publishing video games on the platform. 
• Facebook (in competition with TikTok and Youtube) will pay $1 million to creators in the next year and a half in an attempt to attract creators to its platform. 
• Paramount+ has landed a deal to stream Madame X - the documentary on the life and work Madonna - this October. 
• Highest no. of service complaints since 2009; customers are fed up of hearing "Covid excuse" for crappy service - per the UK Institute of Customer Service.
• Now for some weird news, Michigan man finds his home was built using scrapped bowling balls instead of gravel and sand.