US pet industry spending

Americans have been spending more on their pets in proportion to how many probiotic supplements they take, which gives us the unmistakable picture of a household tending to two digestive systems with equal seriousness. The dog is fine. The owner, less sure.

Both grew on the same wellness-and-humanization wave that defined consumer spending in the 2010s. Pet industry spending climbed as owners treated their animals like family, while probiotic supplement sales surged as gut health became a wellness obsession. Two adjacent shelves of the same supermarket, growing on the same anxiety.

So the correlation is one species and another, both being optimized at home. The bowls multiplied. So did the bottles. Nobody felt much better.