Popularity dips for Peloton and other early pandemic favorites

WASHINGTON - Remember all those purchases you just had to make at the height of the pandemic?

"We’ll go with the air fryer," one person said in Bethesda Thursday.

"My husband bought a thousand-piece puzzle," added another.

Well, there’s a decent chance you wouldn’t make those same purchases now.

Earlier in the day, CNBC reported the once-popular Peloton is pausing production and looking to control costs.

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"Kind of been a long time coming in my opinion," explained Ben Wright, a professor in the marketing department at American University.

Andrew Ching, a professor of marketing, economics, and public health at Johns Hopkins University said the Peloton news didn’t surprise him either.

Both professors explained there are plenty of other products that boomed earlier in the pandemic but may not be as popular now. Examples they cited included loungewear, cookware, delivery services, pets – the list goes on and on.

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"It’s not necessarily that fundamentally people’s behavior has changed, it’s just that the situation, the constraints that people are facing have changed," Ching said.

"I think there’s parallels for a lot of these industries that did well during the pandemic and as we are hopefully coming out of it, you’re gonna see consumer spending change," Wright added.

Peloton shared a business update from the preliminary results for its second quarter and the company amassed a total quarterly revenue of approximately $1.14 billion. 

 You can read the full release here.