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There was a lot to notice during this week’s inauguration, from the peaceful transition of power to Lady Gaga’s show-stopping broach, to the debut of a new national voice. And while we watched as captivated citizens, one news item made our market research ears perk up, news that President Joe Biden is locked in a struggle with the Secret Service and State Department about his exercise bike.

My man and I reached new levels of yuppy recently, gifting each other a smart home for Christmas, complete with Apple TV, two HomePod Minis, and a whole host of smart devices like lightbulbs, plugs, and door locks. Now, when we walk into the house, the lights turn on, when we tell Siri it’s bedtime, the lights turn off, and when we tell her it’s feeling dry, the humidifier resumes its steady vapor cloud. Sure, it’s all very cool and convenient, though I will confide I occasionally find myself in an embarrassingly protracted argument with a speaker (“Hey Siri! Stop talking, OMG, let me finish a sentence!”) and that I have come to feel like an early version of the human population in WALL-E.

Well at least it’s almost over, amiright? 2020, what a mess. It  always had a new way to hurt us, only ever briefly pausing the pain to give us some good news (looking at you, MBJ), and felt gratuitously endless. You really do not need market research to tell you that 2020 was horrific, but through it all, we’ve been there with you, chronicling market research and the world that shapes it every week in this humble blog. 

DoorDash went public this week, smashing its expected market value on the heels of its first profitable quarter. The company currently owns nearly half of the US third-party delivery market, up from their one-third share only a year earlier. According to DoorDash, they claimed just 17% of US market share in 2018, but have steadily increased this to their current ~50%, which is twice that of its largest competitor, UberEats. 

What did you do over Thanksgiving weekend? I, for one, got embarrassingly drunk embarrassingly early in my cousin’s backyard, but it seems that my fellow citizens took a more prudent path, spending a good chunk of their time shopping deals from Thanksgiving through  Black Friday and all the way to Cyber Monday. Americans spent roughly $39 billion over this five-day period.