Habits

You’ve heard the maxim that it’s far far more expensive to acquire a new customer than keep an existing one? Part of this is habit. Humans are for the most part creatures of habit. To keep an existing customer, you just need to keep feeding their habit (e.g. a latte every morning at the local Starbucks drive through), and not give them a reason to change it (e.g. keep botching their order). But to get a new customer, you have to get them to change their habits. You have to convince them to do your thing in place of whatever thing they've been doing. That’s a big deal.

I wonder how many of us are going to have our habits rewired due to all of this Coronavirus craziness. Sure, I used to go to Starbucks around 0600 every morning and read for an hour or two. Maybe when all this is over, I realize I can save a lot of calories and money by just making a cup of coffee at home - like I’ve been doing for the past several weeks... or months.

Yeah, I used to go to the gym six times a week. But maybe I can save a lot of time and effort by staying with doing those core floor exercises on my mat in the living room three times a week, and taking a long walk outside for cardio the other three times.

Maybe I learn an important lesson: I don’t really need Starbucks four dollar lattes, or an expensive gym membership.

Could be a lot of places are going to find out a lot of their regulars aren’t coming back.

Other ideas:

Businesses are slow to rehire, acting conservatively in the face of an uncertain future (H/T to Demian Neidetcher).

Businesses find their old employees have made other plans, so they are forced to hire new people who must be retrained, preventing them from achieving their prior level of service, at least anytime soon.

Businesses don't survive this, forcing us to make other accommodations anyway (H/T to Kelly Dixon).

I think it's going to be a substantially different world at the far end of all of this; not just politically and medically, but professionally and personally.