The hottest new tech of 2025 might just be print. Barnes and Noble is leading a revival of brick-and-mortar bookstores, just 10 years after some were writing its obituary. It might be fantasy books driving the revival, but the physical book comeback is very real.
Scroll down to read about screen-free students, smoky snooker halls, and spending-savvy Brits.
Stats to power your week
📚As the Kindle took off in the early 2010s, it sparked some predictions that physical books would be on their way out. But printed books have stuck around more than many expected, and these days, even if you buy ebooks, you’re still more likely to prefer reading print versions (41%) than digital ones (38%). GWI Zeitgeist
🎱Snooker might make you think of pint-sipping players in smoky rooms, but in China, it’s a major sport. A record number of Chinese players are competing in the ongoing World Snooker Championship, and the tournament has more fans there (16%) than Wimbledon (14%) or Formula 1 (12%). GWI Sports
🔋One of China’s hottest exports right now? BYD cars. The EV brand is making big moves overseas, with global awareness of it up 81% year-on-year. GWI Automotive
🛃We’ve highlighted before that one of the biggest consumer trends in recent years is growing concern and skepticism about immigration, and looking locally makes it even clearer. Support for immigration has dropped by 41% in County Galway, Ireland, and more reports are now picking up discontent coming from rural parts of the country. GWI Core
🧑🚀We’re no doubt still processing Katy Perry’s visit to space, but back on Earth, boys are still twice as likely as girls to dream of becoming pilots, explorers, or astronauts. GWI Kids
What’s on our radar
After the initial shock, we’re starting to see more concrete evidence of the impact (or perceived impact) of tariffs on businesses, as well as some clever marketing responses.
Etsy’s CEO has encouraged shoppers to buy domestically, but TikTokers are eyeing up the alternative of buying directly from Chinese factories. Men’s Wearhouse is fortuitously releasing a range of “made in America” clothing, but one showerhead manufacturer’s A/B test proves it: when it comes to shopping, the wallet usually beats the flag. Meanwhile, wellness brand Dame is adding the extra tariff hike as a surcharge, not bundling it into the retail price.
Meanwhile, Shein and Temu products are set to become more expensive. And with tariffs hitting some categories more than others, there are overlaps with other trends worth tracking. Most baby products are made in China, so if they become more expensive, might that lead to people delaying or rethinking having kids, especially with birth rates already so low?
AI agents (including Amazon’s) are now on the market, and we’re about to see if people really want bots doing their shopping. Meanwhile, when asked about ads in a chatbot, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was more excited about a different use case: ChatGPT acting as an ecommerce affiliate, a role that some early users are already testing through its Deep Research feature. And just yesterday OpenAI announced some new improvements on the shopping front.
Following the buzz around Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, we’ve spotted more schools and authorities cracking down on smartphone use. Now, Pinterest has become the first social platform to test a new prompt nudging students to close the app during school time, while the r/dumbphones subreddit is gaining ground.
Chart of the week
It’s finally happened - YouTube has turned 20, giving us the jarring sight of videos uploaded “20 years ago”. If its first decade saw the site finding its feet through Evolution of Dance, Chocolate Rain, and the Harlem Shake, the second half of its life has seen it emerge as a trusted source of information on products.
Since 2015, the biggest jumps in how people do product research have come from vlogs (+74%) and video sites (+63%), while text-based channels like forums and blogs have become less relevant. To put it simply, more people will watch Marques Brownlee give his take on a new tech product than comb through 5,000 words of a blogger doing the same thing.
Local lowdown
The Martin Lewis effect
The most trusted person in Britain might not be a politician or a member of the royal family, but a financial journalist by the name of Martin Lewis. More than anything else, he epitomizes a “shopping around” behavior that’s very distinctive to the UK, especially for utilities and financial services. British consumers lead the world for buying most forms of insurance online (thanks to some very well-advertisedcomparison services), switching a broadband supplier to find a cheaper deal, and picking an energy supplier based on price.
The UK market for telecoms, energy, insurance (and groceries) is incredibly price-competitive, with consumers given more freedom to move between providers than is possible in many other countries. It’s sometimes taken for granted, but the UK’s direct-to-consumer model for insurance differs from other countries where brokers and banks still play a big role.
If nothing else, it might come back to the British love of thrift. As well as everything mentioned above, Brits are the most likely to say they always try to recycle, possibly inherited from the legacy of rationing and “make do and mend” initiatives during the Second World War.
