Quote:
Originally Posted by trueviking
It's a great question....every single one of them has a different excuse....game day experience, whatever that means, true north doesn't care about them, the food, the sight lines, the seats, the cost of tickets, the cost of beer...it's a never ending list....I personally think COVID has made people sedentary and they are just looking for excuses to convince themselves they should stay home.
I look at my beer league hockey that used to have 12 divisions, and now it has six....my summer slow pitch league had 16 teams and now it has 8....i honestly think working from home and the general routine of not going out has created a sedentary society....and in the smallest city in the NHL that has significant repercussions.
I truly believe life has become a competition to see who can never leave their house the most.....we skip food instead of going to restaurants, we watch Netflix instead of going to movies.
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I think there is some truth to this, but I also feel it's only part of the story. This perspective glosses over the massive economic and social upheaval the pandemic caused that extends beyond laziness. Have people gotten used to a bit more of a lazy, convenient lifestyle of staying home due to being forced to do so for 2 years? Yes, to a certain extent. But that's only part of the story.
Since the pandemic, we've seen record inflation, people are working less hours for a variety of reasons, older people are retiring at faster rates, housing costs and interest rates have hit recent highs, wages haven't kept up with inflation, and people have become a lot more bitter about their fellow man following divergences in philosophy among groups on how we approach a global crisis.
Sure, an increasingly large amount of people may prefer to order food on Skip/Doordash, or watch a Jets game on TV in the comfort of their home instead of buying $100 tickets and braving the cold, but I'd argue people are just exhausted. Exhausted by the pandemic, exhausted by the cost of living, exhausted by "trying to keep up", exhausted by paycheques that never seem to rise faster than the price of food and gas, exhausted by social media, and so on. And this isn't a local phenomena, it's global. It's just that Winnipeg's market is smaller than other major places in Canada that have NHL teams, so perhaps this issue is being reflected more acutely in Jets' attendance.
Oh, and let's not forget that a bunch of people actually died during the pandemic. And lots of people were left with long term complications. Oh, and two years of isolation meant a fall/winter this year where other respiratory illnesses began running rampant and overloading hospitals and healthcare systems across Canada and the world as people began getting back to their usual daily activities.
So forgive society for not being so quick to unload $250 on NHL tickets, parking, and hot dogs when the value of that money is ever shrinking for the average household relative to the cost of groceries, interest rates, housing, and fuel, while also trying to avoid catching the 4th flu/cough for the year, and being exhausted by your workplace that can't or won't find staff to fill their ever increasing list of vacant positions while offering you a nice 1.3% wage increase in the face of 6.8% inflation, while hearing constant 24/7 news about an impending recession and social anxiety about how everyone is going to afford their house or rent in this high interest rate, high commodity price environment.
Chalking up declines in consumer interest in certain sectors as everyone just being lazy is, in itself, a lazy response that ignores so many economic and social issues.
Anecdotally, the restaurants I've all been to in the past few months have been absolutely packed and difficult to get reservations at.
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