Back-to-school (BTS) shopping since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is “a story largely about electronics,” said Katherine Cullen, National Retail Federation senior director-industry and consumer insights, on a Tuesday webcast. Per-person electronics spending grew from $203 and $235 in 2019 for BTS (K-12) and back-to-college (BTC) students to $296 and $306 last year; this season’s per-person spend on electronics is estimated at $293 for BTS and $300 for BTC. Overall, BTS spending grew from $26.2 billion in 2019 to a record $37.1 billion in 2021, and NRF projects $36.9 billion for this year. Back-to-college spending was $54.5 billion in 2019, $71 billion last year, with $73.9 billion projected for 2022. Both student segments “dramatically increased their spending" on electronics during the BTS season since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with about 50% of the growth in BTS spending and a quarter of BTC spending driven by electronics, Cullen said. Continued high electronics numbers were initially “a little surprising” due to the spike in spending throughout the pandemic when people shifted to virtual and hybrid learning, Cullen said. She credited “stickiness” in electronics, saying, “It has really become a core category for the back-to-class season.” She noted a difference in the types of electronics people are buying this year vs. last year. Purchases are consistent for laptops, mobile devices and calculators, but she cited “softness” in computer mice, speakers and printers, “things that people may have really stocked up on during the pandemic.” Cullen said consumers are more concerned about supply chain disruptions this year than last, which led to early shopping. Many retailers brought in inventory early in the year to avoid supply chain bottlenecks, she noted. Consumer data is based on a survey of 7,000 respondents.

States and localities hoping to protect their cable franchise fee revenue streams in a world increasingly switching to over-the-top streaming will face some big challenges, said government finance and communications regulation experts Monday in a NATOA webinar. The wave of litigation from localities seeking franchise fees from streaming services could prompt Congress to revisit legislative efforts to define digital goods and digital sales and create a uniform framework for how they're treated by taxing authorities, said Michael Belarmino, Government Finance Officers Association senior policy adviser. That could be to states' and localities' disadvantage if Congress reintroduces provisions of the Digital Goods and Services Tax Fairness Act, which tried to prohibit multiple taxes on digital sales of goods. The bill was last reintroduced in 2019 (see 1903130071). "It's not a sustainable path" to count on traditional franchise fee statutes as a route to getting revenue from online services, said Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer, noting court efforts to pursue streaming services for franchise fees haven't borne much fruit. The underlying purpose of cable franchise law is about physical buildout and physical access, but streaming services don't touch a town the way cable operators do, he said. He said an effort is needed to put public interest requirements on ISPs. He said one upside of NCTA's challenge of Maine's public, educational and government (PEG) access channel carriage provisions is the U.S. District Court deciding and 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding that channel placement and PEG picture quality requirements are consumer protections. Some members of Congress have been struggling for years with how to promote localism by streaming offerings, Bergmayer said. Newspapers and local broadcasters have an inherent local quality and there are mechanisms like promotion of local ownership, he said. Those issues and levers aren't as clear with online content, he said. Bergmayer said a cable operator offering fiber to customers in part of a community and traditional cable to customers in another part is "not good enough" and could be evidence of redlining.

Dining out and streaming TV subscriptions top the list of things Americans are least willing to give up amid 40-year-high inflation, a HomeServe survey found. The supplier of home repair subscription services polled 1,700 U.S. adults June 3-6, finding 82% who said inflation was affecting their household budgets, with groceries, gas and utilities the budgetary areas most affected, it said. Respondents are also delaying purchases due to inflationary pressures, it said.

IDC has “realistic” expectations of a “consumer-led recession” affecting global economies in the second half of this year and into 2023, Stephen Minton, vice president-customer insights and analysis, told an IDC webinar Thursday on global recessionary scenarios and their impact on information tech spending. “We have reached a point where consumer spending is under a fair amount of pressure for the first six months of this year,” said Minton. IDC’s forecasts are for a “mild” recession, compared with those of the 2008 financial crisis and the dot.com fallout of the early 2000s, followed by a “soft landing” in 2023, he said. “We did have a period where consumers were pretty flush with disposable income” through COVID government stimulus packages throughout the world, he said: “That meant that consumers felt pretty bullish about a year ago.” Consumers to a certain extent were “willing and able to pay a little bit more for certain things, including technology, as prices began to rise,” said Minton. “We’ve kind of gotten to the point now where consumers are no longer willing, or in many cases able, to keep on increasing how much they’re spending as prices continue to rise.” The risk of recession “has clearly increased,” said Minton, but “there are no signs of businesses and service providers yet taking a really sharp knife” to their short-term IT budget planning. “The consumer side is much more vulnerable,” he said. “It’s a different kind of story. We already have pretty solid evidence of a slowdown in shipments of PCs and other consumer devices in the first half of this year, which is likely to get maybe even worse if we continue to head into a more negative economic climate in the next six to 12 months.”

As customers’ phone and device usage grows, they’re citing more problems with network quality, and the perception of network quality is declining, reported J.D. Power Thursday. The most common reported problem is slow loading or failure to load content, it said. The most “influential problems on network quality ratings continue to be streaming audio and video quality, low loading times and calls not going through,” said J.D. Power Managing Director Ian Greenblatt. “An uptick in wireless and device usage was bound to catch up to network quality,” Greenblatt said, saying the more wireless customers are growing adept in using data and streaming, the more they’re aware of problems. The number of problems reported is significantly lower when 5G is available, he said. Verizon Wireless ranked highest in five regions evaluated in the study, with the fewest network quality problems per 100 connections in call, messaging and data quality in the Mid-Atlantic, North Central, Northeast, Southeast and West regions. AT&T ranked highest or was tied in the three ratings in the Southwest.

That U.S. consumer tech sales are projected to decline 0.2% this year is “no surprise,” said CTA President Gary Shapiro Thursday on LinkedIn of the association's midyear industry forecast report. “With inflation at a 40-year high and a recession on the horizon (or perhaps already here), consumers are battening down the hatches and not increasing their spending in 2022,” he said. COVID-19 restrictions have eased and people are spending more on travel, dining and entertainment, “which I see as broadly positive for our society -- even if it means a return to near pre-pandemic levels of spending on tech,” he said. Half of CTA member companies canvassed by the association expect shipping and logistics disruptions “will continue for a year or longer, a sign that unsnarling supply chains will require long term effort and a continued push for business-enabling public policy,” said Shapiro. CTA accentuated the positives in describing the expected 2022 sales decline, saying it projects "a return to pre-2020 levels of technology sales after 2021's historic purchasing surge led to a record $504 billion in U.S. retail revenue." The industry will experience "negative sales and shipment growth" for the first time since 2009, it said. Despite the overall decrease for the rest of 2022, 5G smartphones, gaming, smart home and health tech are the sectors that will drive growth "into 2023," said CTA.

Since 2019, expected U.S. back-to-college spending has grown by $19 billion, with consumers laying out $223 more on average than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic, said the National Retail Federation Thursday. Back-to-school (BTS) spending is expected to match 2021’s $37 billion: Families with children K-12 plan to spend an average $864 on school items, about $15 more than last year; back-to-college spending is projected at $74 billion, up from $71 billion in 2021. College students and their families plan to spend $1,199 on school items, on par with last year’s $1,200, NRF said. Nearly half of the increase comes from spending on electronics and dorm or apartment furnishings. Amid rising inflation, 38% of consumers are cutting back other spending to cover the cost of school items, said a survey of 7,830 consumers fielded June 30-July 7. “Families consider back-to-school and college items as an essential category, and they are taking whatever steps they can, including cutting back on discretionary spending, shopping sales and buying store- or off-brand items, in order to purchase what they need for the upcoming school year,” said NRF CEO Matthew Shay. As of early July, 56% of shoppers had started shopping for school and college supplies, and 68% said they faced higher prices on school items. Sales events are likely to play a larger role for BTS shoppers, with 81% saying they planned to use this week to shop for school items: Some 62% planned to shop Prime Day deals on Amazon, 31% planned to shop other online retailers and 20% said they planned to look for deals in stores, NRF said. The top five BTS shopping destinations are online (50%), department stores (45%), discount retailers (40%), clothing stores (37%) and electronics stores (28%); for college, top shopping destinations are online (43%), department stores (36%), discount stores (29%), office supply stores (27%) and college bookstores (26%), it said.

U.S. internet service costs in June were up 2.6% year over year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index unadjusted data released Wednesday. It said residential phone service costs increased 4% year over year, but wireless service was down 0.9%. Cable and satellite TV service costs were flat. BLS said June prices overall were up 9.1% year over year before seasonal adjustment.

Cable and satellite TV customers spend $1,600 a year on unwatched TV channels, up more than $500 from 2019, said a Wednesday CordCutting.com study. The average pay-TV customer has access to 190 channels but regularly watches only 15, vs. 11 in 2019, which averages out to $9.57 per channel watched, it said. About 80% of cable/satellite users watch five or more channels; 47% watch 10 or more; 24% watch 20-plus and 13% watch 30 or more, it said. The average cable TV monthly bill has risen 52% in the past three years from $96 to $147, it said. Cordcutting.com noted channels such as ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are available for free without a cable or satellite package. About 37% of cable/satellite TV subscribers find good value in their subscription; 45% would cancel if it weren’t tied to their internet service, it said. Over two-thirds of millennials and Generation Z cable or satellite TV users also pay for a streaming service vs. 57% of Gen X and 44% of baby boomers, the study said. The study of 507 people in the U.S. who paid for cable or satellite service was fielded in May. The percentage of Americans watching cable or satellite TV dropped by over 20 points from 2015 to 2021, with another 4.7 million households cutting the cord last year alone, said Managing Editor Stephen Lovely.

Wavering supply and demand sent PC shipments plunging 15.3% in the second quarter to 71.3 million units, reported IDC Monday. It was the second straight quarter of lower shipments, following two years of growth, and the decline “was worse than expected as supply and logistics further deteriorated due to the lockdowns in China and persistent macroeconomic headwinds,” said IDC. "Fears over a recession continue to mount and weaken demand across segments," said IDC analyst Jitesh Ubrani. "Consumer demand for PCs has weakened in the near term and is at risk of perishing in the long term as consumers become more cautious about their spending and once again grow accustomed to computing across device types such as phones and tablets.” Though enterprise PC demand has been more “robust” than in the consumer segment, “it has also declined as businesses delay purchases," said Ubrani. Market leader Lenovo widened its Q2 share over No. 2 brand HP -- 24.6% to 18.9% -- with No. 3 Dell Technologies close behind at 18.5%, said IDC.