Lockdown measures and fear of the virus kept wallets shut (Chart 3).2 To analyze this further, we can divide spending into four categories: essentials (such as food and clothing), non-essentials (such as cars and other durable goods), hard-to-distance items (primarily services such as travel) and shelter.3 Hard-to-distance items represented more than half of the decline in spending, which reflected a significant reduction in sales at restaurants, bars and hotels.
I know many of you felt this acutely. 2 The weakness in spending was mostly due to services consumption (about 75 percent). 3 The consumption categories are based on those used in J. MacGee, T. M. Pugh and K. See,  “The Heterogeneous Effects of COVID-19 on Canadian Household Consumption, Debt and Savings,” Bank of Canada Staff Working Paper No. 2020-51 (November 2020).