We’re Spending Billions on This Work-From-Home Indulgence
Without the boss nearby, who can resist placing that Amazon order?
By RACHEL FEINTZEIG
Tue, May 21, 2024 9:18am
4 min
4 min
Click. Scroll. Add to cart. Now toggle back to that Zoom meeting.
On our remote days, it turns out, we shop while we work. Researchers say it’s driving billions in online sales. There we all are, browsing everything from toothpaste to concert tickets while nodding along on a video call , keying in credit-card info in between dashing off emails to the boss.
Shopping away our entire workday is obviously a bad move. But indulging in a little isn’t going to tank productivity. We pause and procrastinate at the office, too, in ways that are acceptable there. At home, we gather around clothing reviews like we’re hanging out at the office water cooler, and tick errands off our list via Target.com.
With no one looking over our shoulders, we can puncture the monotony of another vanilla workday with the dopamine high of finding the perfect pair of shoes. Even if we might sometimes regret it.
“I wouldn’t have bought this stupid thing if it weren’t for All Hands,” Megan Morreale , a content marketer in New Jersey, thought to herself after purchasing an influencer’s branded candle during a companywide meeting. Bored or between calls, the 32-year-old scrolls Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Days later, subpar art supplies or a viral dress that really doesn’t suit her land on her doorstep. Oh well.
“It’s a little bit of fun during the day,” she says, without the fear you’ll look like a slacker . At the office, she would never. “All the guilt is completely gone when you work from home.”
A $375 billion boost
Our collective retail therapy adds up. New research from Stanford University, Northwestern University and the Mastercard Economics Institute, the payments company’s research arm, finds the pandemic prompted a rise in online shopping that’s persisted. Last year, for example, we spent $375 billion more than we would have otherwise, the report estimates.
The brunt of that bump is being driven by people working hybrid or fully remote schedules, says Nick Bloom , a Stanford economist and co-author. County-level data shows that in areas where work-from-home jobs are prevalent, online shopping is up, while it’s back to pre pandemic levels in places where more folks work in-person.
Along with walking the dog and getting a jump on dinner, workday shopping is a way to make efficient use of our time, Bloom says, and take advantage of the fact that we have more control over it at home.
“People just can’t work continuously without taking a break,” he says.
Get away without leaving your desk
At home, there’s freedom and time, but also often inertia.
“There’s no coffee break, there’s no somebody’s birthday,” says Ace Bhattacharjya , chief executive of a company that helps folks access their medical records.
Instead, there’s perusing a limited-edition sneaker drop, or collectible figurines on eBay, Bhattacharjya says, recalling some of his recent scrolling. Everything in stores looks the same these days, he finds, but online he can jump down a rabbit hole into random micro communities and inspiration. Turning his attention from the work on his computer monitor to e-commerce on his iPad Pro gives him a jolt of creativity and energy.
Besides, the lines between work and everything else have grown hazy. Bhattacharjya’s hours bleed into the weekends. That can feel like permission to wedge some personal stuff into the workweek.
Ooh, a sale!
Weekly online spending peaks from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Fridays , as the workweek slows to its languorous end, data from Adobe shows. More than a quarter of women surveyed last year by shopping portal Rakuten said they typically shop online during work hours. For Gen Z, the share was 41%.
Jenny Hirschey , who runs an Instagram jewellery shop from St. Paul, Minn., was surprised to find about 80% of her sales are made during the workday.
“I get comments all the time like, ‘I’m running to a meeting but this heart charm is mine! Sold! I’ll pay you in 30 minutes,’” she says.
Big retailers have noticed the trend, too, says Liza Amlani , a retail consultant and adviser based in Toronto who’s worked with companies like Under Armour and Lands’ End.
Some of her clients are timing things like product drops and marketing emails around noon or 3 p.m.
“We know that you’re on your computer,” captive and craving a pick-me-up, she says.
Retailers have also ramped up their investments in online tech, and are flooding their websites with more product, she adds. Algorithm-powered recommendations are getting so powerful it can feel like they know your subconscious desires before you do. Oh, and did you forget about that item you halfheartedly popped in your cart? Here’s 20% off.
“You’re getting so much more of that reminder and that call to buy,” says Nancy Wong , a consumer psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The seduction of online shopping
Bricks-and-mortar browsing comes with unknowns and annoyances: traffic en route, long lines at the store, finding out what you want isn’t in stock.
In contrast, Wong says, clicking the buy button online brings a satisfying certainty, and a double hit of pleasure. There’s the immediate high of plucking the item from the virtual shelf—then, the anticipation of its arrival. Sure, that gadget might be a flop once it gets here. But it’s on its way.
“It’s so seductive,” says Michelle Drapkin , a therapist in New Jersey who works a hybrid schedule.
When she worked for a big healthcare company years back, she’d never dream of pulling up Amazon on her office computer.
On her work-from-home days now, she’ll sometimes flop on her bed with a laptop and check purchases off her to-do list. It’s relaxing, she says. “I can do something different than work that’s still productive.”
Some purchases, like groceries, keep her household running. Others, like a new dress for a Kentucky Derby party, feel like a treat.
By the time the purchase arrives, though, she’s usually forgotten what’s inside the box.
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Wall Street’s hottest momentum trade has reversed sharply, as former winners tumble and heavily shorted stocks surge.
By Gregory Zuckerman and Gunjan Banerji
Mon, Aug 31, 2026 3 min
3 min
Wall Street’s hottest trade has gone ice cold.
For years, it paid off to buy stocks that were rising in price—and bet against struggling shares. The momentum trade was especially profitable this year, as investors piled into hot stocks including Micron Technology, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and other artificial-intelligence darlings while wagering against those likely to be hurt by the embrace of AI.
The S&P 500 Momentum Index soared 44% in the second quarter, its best quarterly performance on record, and it surged 133% over the past five years, nearly double the broad market’s performance.
Mega funds and rookie investors alike piled into the trade, some using leverage and options contracts in an effort to amplify their returns, propelling the underlying shares higher.
“It is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Matthew Tym, managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald, of the trade.
Suddenly, the trade is a loser. The momentum index has tumbled more than 9% since July 1, lagging behind the S&P 500’s 2.8% gain. The index—which tracks stocks in the S&P 500 based on a “momentum score”—is on track for the biggest quarterly underperformance in 25 years. July was the second-worst month for the momentum trade in around 40 years, according to Bank of America estimates; the only month worse was April 2009, in the teeth of the global financial crisis.
Hedge funds that bought momentum shares while shorting low-momentum stocks suffered even more. At the same time, a basket of the most popular stocks held by hedge funds tracked by Goldman Sachs recorded its biggest one-month underperformance in July relative to the S&P 500 in more than 20 years, according to the bank’s analysts.
Momentum trading is based on a rather simple observation: Investments that go up tend to keep outperforming; those that underperform often remain laggards. This kind of trading might seem too simple a stock-picking strategy to work. Yet it often has.
“For decades, it didn’t take a lot of sophistication to run a momentum strategy and make a decent living at it,” says Agustin Lebron, senior researcher at EquiLibre, a trading firm.
Part of the reason: It takes a while for corporate and other information to spread to various investors, so they slowly build positions, producing buying momentum.
“A huge pension fund can’t flip around its positions in a day,” says Lebron. “Behavioral biases also account for some of the effect, as well—people tend to sell their winners too early and hold losers too long.”
Fans of the strategy point to the human tendency to extrapolate from past results—and chase investment returns—noting that momentum patterns have been evident in markets for decades, even centuries. They also say that some of the worst months for momentum strategies are during longer periods of outperformance.
Some have been doing the trade by buying the strongest investments in a sector while shorting the weakest; others lean in to rising markets or asset classes. Still others use a quantitative approach or turn to banks or others who sell ways to make distinct wagers on momentum as a “tradable factor” or a “thematic basket.”
The fans remain believers. “Any strategy has disappointing periods,” says Antti Ilmanen, global co-head of the portfolio solutions group at AQR Capital Management.
The surge in Moderna and other biotech stocks helped crush the momentum trade. These shares were among the most heavily shorted in recent years, but positive news on a cancer vaccine from Moderna and Merck sent those stocks flying, crushing some quant and other hedge funds. Moderna is up around 150% so far this month.
These traders had an especially rough day on Aug. 19, which Goldman Sachs told its clients was the worst day for “systematic long-short managers” in more than two years. About half of the losses were because of momentum trades, the bank said.
Some traders have begun to short, or bet against, the very stocks that propelled the momentum trade earlier this year. Net short positions in futures tied to the Nasdaq-100 index among speculators recently climbed to some of the highest levels of the past two decades, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The about-face is a sign of how markets have become more treacherous for investors, even as indexes keep climbing. Part of the issue: the recent meltdown of Situational Awareness, a hedge fund that had piled into some of the most popular momentum shares, including chip stocks. After a period of market tumult, Nvidia shares rocketed almost 9% after its earnings, showing how quickly sentiment can shift.
Some investors say the run-up in share prices driving tech stocks higher reminds them at times of the dot-com frenzy decades ago.
Mike Ogborne, the founder of San Francisco-based Ogborne Capital Management, said he has grown more cautious on technology stocks and is keeping more of his portfolio in cash than he typically does.
And he is nervous about the surge in spending by technology giants and quarterly capital expenditures that keep rising.
“It is a little bit like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight. You don’t know when midnight is going to come around,” Ogborne said. “They don’t send a memo around telling you when the capex cycle is over.”
