Discretionary pet services are climbing back, new report shows

Lockdowns and social distancing made services like grooming, boarding, pet sitting/walking and training virtually impossible. With restrictions mainly lifted, these services have bounced back big time.

As reported in Packaged Facts’ just released Pet Services in the U.S., the two travel-related pet service segments, boarding and pet sitting/walking, suffered the most due to COVID-19, with sales plummeting 45% and 35%, respectively, in 2020.

The overall non-medical pet services sector dipped 22% to $8.1 billion.

Report author David Lummis shares: “This relative resilience owes to the strong momentum that pet services carried into the pandemic.” Sales momentum was and will resume being driven by the pets-as-family mentality, by brick-and-mortar retailers’ increased emphasis on services rather than products (to better compete with the Internet), by the distinctive pet care spending of Millennials, and by the upper-income household skew driving discretionary spending in the pet industry overall.

Pet service demographics are disproportionately upscale and urban. For example, use of dog training skews to owners with a household income of $100,000 or more, who live in the top 10 metropolitan areas, or who have graduate degrees.

Also softening the stay-at-home blow of the pandemic, and boding well for pet service sales going forward, is the pet acquisition boom in the wake of COVID-19. Packaged Facts estimates that 13% of households (or 23% of current pet-owning households) added a dog to their home in the previous 12 months, while 11% added a cat in that same period.

The non-medical pet services business will continue to benefit from these factors, as well as from the ongoing venture capital investment that now characterizes the pet industry.