Spam canned meat sales

It is a curious feature of the universe that the number of tins of processed pork product sold in Western supermarkets should move in near-perfect synchronisation with the spending habits of Chinese consumers on a single day in November, as though some invisible hand were orchestrating both the impulse purchases of people in Milwaukee and the digital shopping carts of Shanghai. One might have expected these two phenomena to be as causally connected as the price of tea in China and the number of left-handed flute players in Scandinavia, yet here we are, with a 0.977 correlation coefficient suggesting they are practically twins separated at birth. They are not, of course.

What is almost certainly happening—and this is the sort of thing that keeps economists awake in their hotels—is that both Spam sales and Alibaba's annual shopping festival are proxies for the same underlying economic current: rising middle-class purchasing power in Asia between 2010 and 2021, particularly in China, paired with increased availability of Western goods. When Chinese consumers had more money to spend on Singles Day, Western exporters and importers also had more confidence to stock shelves with non-perishable foods, including tinned meat products that appeal to a certain demographic. You could fit roughly 380 million tins of Spam into the Shanghai stadium and still have room for a modest gift shop, which is to say the scale of both markets during this period was genuinely staggering.

What we are witnessing is not causation but a kind of statistical echo chamber where two separate human behaviours—one driven by retail psychology and one by cultural tradition—happen to rise and fall together because they both reflect the same economic tailwind. It should worry us slightly that we can draw a line through almost any two datasets if we squint hard enough and look through the right telescope. The correlation is real; the connection is imaginary.