Streaming service subscriptions

Between 2007 and 2022, US frozen pizza retail sales and streaming service subscriptions both grew, correlating at 0.9644 across sixteen data points. This is the most honest correlation on the entire website. The person who subscribes to Netflix is the person who orders a frozen pizza. The couch is the shared variable. The evening is the shared context. The frozen pizza does not require leaving the house; neither does the streaming service. Together they describe the complete American evening: horizontal, warm, and requiring minimal effort. The data is not spurious. It is autobiographical.

Frozen pizza sales grew from roughly $4.5 billion to over $7 billion between 2007 and 2022, driven by product quality improvements, premium options, and the convenience trend accelerated by the pandemic. Streaming subscriptions grew from near-zero to over 1.5 billion globally. Both are convenience-driven consumer categories that benefit from the same behavioral shift: Americans spending more evenings at home with delivery or frozen food and on-demand entertainment. The shared demographic is real, even if the causal link is indirect.

When two products serve the same use case—the low-effort evening at home—their sales curves will correlate genuinely, not just spuriously. The frozen pizza and the streaming service are not accidentally correlated; they are the two halves of the same consumer behavior.