From Changing America:
Many Americans are watching more television in quarantine and lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, but the plethora of content is often niche. Still, in a year of polarizing politics, “The Queen’s Gambit” has united viewers around the world.
Seven episodes were enough to garner the show a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and accolades from major critics and publications. A more surprising measure of the show’s success, however, shows just how much one show can change American culture.
“The idea that a streaming television series can have an impact on product sales is not a new one, but we are finally able to view it through the data,” said Juli Lennett, toys industry advisor for NPD, in a statement. “The sales of chess books and chess sets, which had previously been flat or declining for years, turned sharply upward as the popular new series gained viewers.”
. . . .
Sales of chess sets rose by 87 percent in the United States while sales of chess books jumped by 603 percent, according to U.S. Retail Tracking Service data from NPD, which showed that week-over-week sales had been relatively flat for 13 weeks before the show debuted. Google searches for “chess” and “how to play chess” hit a nine-year peak, according to Netflix, and the number of new players on Chess.com quintupled.
Link to the rest at Changing America
Sales grew by 600%! So instead of selling 1 book, they sold 6 🙂
I often tease my brother…he loves Neil Young and back when he was buying CDs, he would regularly go to stores and look through stuff on sale. Invariably, there would be a NY CD on sale sometime in the Xmas season. He’d look at it, see a hits album, decide it was worth getting, and buy it. Totally forgetting he had the SAME CD already. He bought the SAME one — cuz it was good — twice one year. And about 3m later I saw a reference to some Neil Young concert or tribute band or something coming through. Which I’m positive was the result of some metric showing that he was selling like hotcakes in the area. Up 200%!
In another life, I’m into astronomy, and there are HUGE runs right now on people buying scopes cuz they’re at home and can’t go anywhere. Yet the likelihood of failure to land someone’s interest is about the same…and in about 2-3 years, there are a lot of astro gurus expecting a TON of used scopes on the market from people who gave up on the hobby. But right now? Sales are exploding! 🙂 In fact, they’re almost…astronomical.
P.
I did not know that about the scopes – thank you. I’ve never been able to justify the scope I wanted, so I’ll keep an eye on that.
Nope. “Culture” is more than a couple of years, or at least it is to anyone a bit older than the apparently young (going by their extremely “woken” website) writers at “Changing America.”
I am sure that there are many others here who remember 1972. Some may have to dredge a bit, but it will come to you. Fischer-Spassky ring a bell? Chess had a massive upsurge in popularity when the “spunky American” faced off against the “grim Russian” World Grand Champion.
I’d been playing chess for about four years then, so it was heady stuff for me – just as I entered junior high school, funds were suddenly available for an official chess club. Every desk in the study hall was filled by earnest faces. Transportation and meals were laid on to other towns in the area, and even to the State championship in the Phoenix area – my memory doesn’t say it might not have been Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale, or some other city in the Valley – but it does remember being third in the State among seventh graders :).
Two years later… A half dozen diehards, and that was it. Funds no longer lavished on the club. I heard that it died with a whimper, not a bang, before another year was up (the high school club died before I became a freshman).
Give it two or three years, and most of those chess sets will be gathering dust, as well as those chess books. (I still have the paperback analyzing the games – but couldn’t tell you just where in the stacks it happens to be. Might even be out in the garage storage…)
Tim Rice said it best, in the lyrics sung by the Merchandisers in the musical, Chess: