Cable TV subscriptions

Here we have cable television subscriptions and postal package volumes, two phenomena that appear to have made a pact to move in opposite directions for eighteen years, which suggests either that Americans collectively decided to stop watching TV in order to receive more boxes, or that the universe has developed a sense of irony so refined it barely bothers to announce itself. One wonders what cosmic accountant is keeping this ledger. The correlation is nearly perfect, which is rather the problem.

The actual villain here is almost certainly the internet, that great rewirer of human behavior, which managed to simultaneously kill cable (people streaming instead) while birthing the e-commerce monster (people receiving packages instead). Between 2005 and 2022, Amazon alone went from shipping roughly 20 million packages annually to over 3.5 billion, while cable subscribers dropped from about 65 million to 46 million households. These aren't actually connected—they're both symptoms of the same shift in how we consume entertainment and goods. Add in the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic acceleration of online shopping, and the general human migration toward convenience over tradition, and you've got a perfect storm of cultural realignment that just happens to move two completely unrelated industries in opposite directions.

What we're looking at is the statistical equivalent of watching two dancers who have never met perfectly mirror each other's movements, which tells you nothing about whether they planned it and everything about whether they're both responding to the same orchestra. Cable and packages aren't enemies in some grand narrative—they're both passengers on the same ship, just riding different decks. The real story isn't the correlation. It's what made it possible.