Research has discovered that lockdown too has its own pros and cons. Due to lockdown, people have started to grow and buy more fresh food, to survive with what’s available, and waste less.
The results focused on five key areas:
- Food shopping and buying behavior
One of the biggest changes is our attitude towards branded goods. We do not focus on buying branded goods anymore and focus on buying only essentials from whatever the brand it is produced from. This will reduce the expenses of an individual and will make him realize that he could do and live without always going for branded products. This will also make him realize what other great things he could do with money he has saved avoiding expensive branded products. On the other hand, if they become too conscious of spending money for quality products, and always choose the cheapest, this would also create problems as these low-quality products would not work as efficiently as the other ones.
- Eating
More research reveals that waste of food has reduced by 65 percent. Availability of home-delivery service would be an advantage following with less shopping trips. This too save money and helps the environment by the reducing the usage of unrecyclable shopping bags. Moreover, this reduces the percentage of product packages being dumped on streets. Peoples’ attitude towards wasting food unnecessarily have changed too. Eating of meals have gone towards healthy side as it would be only home cooked fresh food. But this lockdown has a disadvantage as people now cannot go to their usual places of exercise like gyms and parks, thus making them gain calories and creating health issues for eating too much.
- Exercise and weight
One of the setbacks of this lockdown is that the usage of gyms and parks have reduced at extreme levels as nobody goes out during this period of time. Half of the population would not exercise as usual as they have no access to their usual exercise destinations, therefore, they would not exercise and would collect more calories, fats, and lipids by the day. This sudden cut-off of exercises would create serious health issues. The weight of our body too will increase day by day due to this cut-off of doing exercises in gyms and parks. Though the restrictions of gyms, parks and other destinations are put down, there are some people who still exercise out in their gardens and there are some people who exercise more than before as they have more time than before.
- Online Activity
This lockdown has increased the online activity by at least 92 percent as now schools teach their lessons through video chat and other online methods. Online marketing too has risen 20 percent since the lockdown. This online activity too saves us money. If we take online schooling for example, we save a lot of money that was used for transportation and other purposes that cost to get to school. This also revealed the fact that online marketing is more efficient than travelling to the shop. We save the money not only from transportation cost, but also avoiding unnecessary expenditures. When we got to supermarkets, we usually buy some products that we really do not need and still can survive without. This is reduced and most likely is not done anymore once you start online marketing, so in conclusion we save money from this too. But as always it comes with a set of disadvantages, if we buy only through online marketing, we would not be able to get some essential items because of difficulties and risks of delivering items and distance problems that also is followed with a high delivery charge.
- Usage of Drugs
Due to this lockdown, the usage of drugs has also reduced. As drugs would not be made cause of the lockdown, only the drugs that were already out in the world would be sold. However, selling this would be very hard due to the lockdown as there will be no way to meet the buyer. The buyers will have no way of communicating and meeting at one place as well. The dealers would have no money to buy drugs from suppliers, as dealer too would have no money since he has no buyer. The drug users too would not have money to spare for drugs since they would not have jobs because of this lockdown. With all these reasons, and the high cost of drugs, the cut-off of drugs is chosen by drug users. But still there would be some people who would kill for money or steal money to buy drugs as they have no income to survive or because they cannot stop their addiction.
As you can see this lockdown does have a lot of advantages over disadvantages.
