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Best Buy CEO Corie Barry blames Taylor Swift and the younger generation for why her company’s sales and profits are down.
She calls it “funflation.”
Speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit last week, Barry stated, “‘Funflation,’ Taylor Swift… those experiences are really where people are willing to pay, means the bigger ticket items in electronics are not right now where people are interested.”
She says that since Best Buy raked it in during the pandemic when everyone was hunkered down at home, people have been spending a lot of their money on “experiences” like concerts and vacations instead of tech.
Case in point: Swift’s Eras Tour movie opened this past weekend and earned an eye-popping $94 to $96 million at the U.S. box office, making it the most commercially successful concert film of all time. Globally it earned between $126 million to $130 million.
Pretty amazing for a movie that was only announced just six weeks ago.
It is experiences like Taylor Swift’s concert movie that are supposedly hurting companies like Best Buy, as well as businesses that deal in appliances, pet supplies, and home improvement.
This has also been called a “YOLO economy,” in which consumers use the mantra “You only live once” to justify their purchases. The term “revenge spending” has come into use as well, with Delta CEO Ed Bastian referring to the fun-seeking phenomenon as “revenge travel” and saying it’s a $300 billion market opportunity.
“People talk about revenge travel, or pent-up travel—this is beyond anything that people can classify as truly pent-up,” Bastian said on Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast in June. “We went through several years of people not being able to get back out and travel and experience and see loved ones, see their business colleagues, adventures—all the reasons we travel. And people had a lot of time.”
The government’s $4.6 trillion stimulus package is also supposedly to “blame.”
That’s a lot of money that, instead of being spent on things like food and fuel, is being spent on things like concerts, which, at an average of $79.42 a ticket, adds up fast.