In South Korea, a Retail Stat With Big Implications

Some retail stats are humdrum, and others speak volumes. The Wall Street Journal calls attention to one in the latter category out of South Korea: Dog strollers are outselling baby strollers. The trend started last year for the first time and has continued through the first six months of this year, according to the South Korean retailing giant Gmarket. The reason it's so telling is that South Korea's national fertility rate of 0.72 is the lowest in the world among wealthy nations. At this rate, South Korea cannot maintain its current population, which has prompted much hand-wringing among government officials.

"What I worry about is young people not loving each other," Kim Moon-soo, the current labor minister, said last year. "Instead, they love their dogs and carry them around, they don't get married, and they don't have children." All true, except that more and more people aren't so much carrying their dogs around as pushing them around, as evidenced by the crowded pathways at Seoul Forest Park, per the Journal. Sales of dog strollers have quadrupled since 2019 across the nation, with no end in sight to the spike. Read the full story, which notes that President Yoon Suk Yeol and his wife have zero children—and 10 dogs. (More South Korea stories.)