Yankee Candle: the canary in the covid coalmine

When I worked full time, I always found myself sucked in to buying whatever was being flogged by the kids' schools of my colleagues. Thus, I ended up with an awful lot of overpriced, scimpily-packaged wrapping paper (one roll = enough wrapping for one paperback); giant milk chocolate candy bars completely lacking in taste; and - ta-da - Yankee Candle candles, which, as a local, Massachusetts-own company seems to have a grip on the fundraising initiatives of our schools. (True confession: on a leaf-peeping jaunt to Western Mass a few years back, I did stop at their flagship store in South Deerfield. I don't recall buying anything.)

Yankee Candle candles are not something I would purhcase voluntarily. Some of the scents were okay - bayberry, balsam, autumn spice - but mostly I find scented candles pretty

obnoxious. I would buy the okay scents for my mother, who would have them around unlit. Mostly, I just lived in dread of the day when the sale form would go up on a colleagues door. (On the other hand, I lived for the day the Girl Scout Cookie signups came around.)

But a lot of folks love Yankee Candle candles, looking forward each year to the new scents being released. 

(Scented candles, by the way, are a multi-billion dollar market, and Yankee Candle is a market share leader.)

Terri Nelson is a science illustrator from Portland, Oregon. Her inquiring mind prompted her to ask whether the fact that covid often causes people to lose their sense of smell would show up in online reviews of scented products. The scentiest of scented products she could think of: scented candles. This was in 2020.

“There are angry ladies all over Yankee Candle’s site reporting that none of the candles they just got had any smell at all,” she wrote on Twitter [in late November 2020]. “I wonder if they’re feeling a little hot and nothing has much taste for the last couple days too,” she added, a nod to other common coronavirus symptoms. (Source: Washington Post)

Nelson's notion got a lot of attention, and Kate Petrova, a researcher at Bryn Mawr College, took things a step further. She:

 ...decided to test the hypothesis by scraping roughly 20,000 reviews of the most popular scented and unscented candles on Amazon. 

“It is rare, at least in my line of work, to stumble upon an anecdotal observation that can be examined using such vast amounts of easily accessible data,” said Petrova, who stressed that this was a personal project with no relation to her research work.

It turns out that there was something to that "anecdotal observation." Over the prior year, scented candles have lost a full star from their ratings. 

Unscented candle reviews, meanwhile, don’t show the same pattern.

Fast forward a year of living dangerously, and a maths PhD candidate from Zurich named Eleanor (zornsllama on Twitter) mapped the negative, no-scent reviews to covid cases. And voila:

Neither Petrova nor Eleanor/zornsllama is making any claims about the scientific rigor of what they've come up with. And Yankee Candle claims they haven't seen anything different about covid-era reviews. Still, the correlation is interesting. Fun, even, if anything associated with covid can be termed 'fun.'

As for Yankee Candle, I wish them nothing but luck, increased market share, and profits. They may be owned by out-of-towners at this point, but they're still a Massachusetts-own company. It's just that they'll achieve their increased market share and profits without my patronage. Scented candles? No thanks. (Just wondering how school sales are going now that so many businesses are virtual. Harder to put the sign up sign up on the office door if no one's there.)