Hi there,

My marketing team informed me this week that many of your company email servers have been blocking this weekly diatribe, owed apparently to our CRM system or something. I’m hoping we worked that out, finally, and that many of you may be receiving this for the first time. I’d love to tell you that you’ve missed months and months of riveting content but I can’t say that. It’s only been about 8 weeks.

Here are a few of the more noteworthy things we saw at CivicScience this week:

Even as we get better educated about health, we’re doing very little about it. I stumbled upon a question in our system about exercise and found it remarkable in its unremarkable-ness. Beyond very predictable seasonal fluctuations (think “New Year’s Resolution”), the rate at which people exercise hasn’t changed in the three years we’ve tracked it. See for yourself:The number of people who never exercise has risen.

Over the same period, the percentage of U.S. adults who say they eat healthy has actually gone DOWN a couple percentage points:The percentage of people who eat healthy has gone down over the past several years.

Expect more apparel retailers to follow Neiman Marcus’ lead and expand their plus-size offering. Obviously, a variety of size options will allow retailers to serve the largest number of customers. What wasn’t obvious is that size-inclusivity – in and of itself – is viewed as a positive brand virtue even among non-plus-size shoppers. Particularly among today’s uber-powerful Millennial and younger GenX female consumers, inclusiveness is critical on every dimension.

Donald Trump is truly a powerful voice for young females, minorities, and Democrats…at least when it comes to ordering steak. In the ‘unexpected insights’ department, I was fully assuming that only older white Republican men like my dad order their steaks well-done. Alas, I was way off. Perhaps this opens the door for Trump to expand his political base for 2020.

In related news, Trader Joe’s is doing a much better job than Whole Foods of appealing to vegetarians. I don’t have much more to say about that – only that the research surprised me for some reason.

Look for some exciting news from CivicScience this week. I’ll tell you all about it next Saturday.

Have an awesome weekend.

JD