Leeds Business Insights Season 1 Episode #5
S1E5: Peter McGraw - The Case for Caring About People Living the Solo Life
[00:00:00] Amanda: Welcome to the Leeds Business Insights podcast featuring expert analysis to help you stand out from the herd. My name is Amanda Kramer. We are thrilled to be discussing the science of solos with Leeds Professor Dr. Peter McGraw. Peter McGraw is a Professor of Marketing at the Leeds School of Business. He is a behavioral economist and host of the podcast Solo– The Single Person's Guide to a Remarkable Life. Single, not looking to mingle? You're not alone. The singles movement is growing in the United States and worldwide with changing economic education and social situations offering singles, especially women, the freedom to go it alone. My guest today is Leeds professor Peter McGraw, who's doing research and outreach to better understand what drives singles as well as the implications for businesses, which range from talent management to marketing. Welcome, Peter, and thank you so much for being here today.
[00:00:57] Peter: My pleasure.
[00:00:58] Amanda: Tell us a little bit about how we got here to having this conversation about solos and dispelling the misconception that single people are sad and lonely.
[00:01:07] Peter: Well, this actually started as a personal project for me. I had a sabbatical that was forthcoming. And prior to that, I had dedicated more than a dozen years to studying humor, the causes and consequences of comedy. And that was incredibly challenging, fulfilling, life-changing, frankly. But I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do a creative project, and it started off being a project about turning 50. I know I sound like a young man, but I am, I'm on the other side of 50 now. And what I realized was that story was going to be not just about turning 50 and turning 50. Well, it was about doing it as a bachelor.
I'm a lifelong bachelor and the project morphed from a book into a podcast, which you've already mentioned. It was the resource I wish I had when I was a younger man and struggling with my singlehood, feeling like there was something wrong with me that there was something. That I just couldn't get right about relationships. And rather that I could live a fulfilling, happy, dare I say, remarkable life as a single. And so this created this resource designed to dive deeply into this sort of often overlooked topic. And it's now turned into part of my professional life at these, studying how singles are overlooked and undervalued in the marketplace. And it's been quite a ride.
[00:02:40] Amanda: Yes. Well, let's dive into that ride so that we can learn more, and let's start here, help ground us. Let's quantify the rise before we dive in. What are we looking at in terms of numbers here?
[00:02:51] Peter: These are striking numbers. So I'm going to be focused on the United States, but the rise of singles is a global phenomenon for a variety of reasons. In the United States, 128 million adults are single. So nearly one out of every two adults is single. Now that's a big population, from 18-year-old college kids at the University of Colorado to 88-year-old widows and beyond. That number is going to continue to grow. One in four Millennials are projected to never marry. So that's a striking increase than previous generations. And this is one of the most interesting ones– 28% of households in the United States are solo or one occupant. And that number is again increasing worldwide and doing so exponent. Now the reason for the rise is due to many, many reasons, but I'll hit a few of the highlights for you. So the first one is just demographic shifts, for example, it's easier to get divorced now than it was before. And so there are couples that are not staying together that otherwise would have suffered through an unhappy marriage. We have a lower birth rate. We have immigration, and so immigrants tend to be single. They tend to be a solo when they first come over to the United States. We have people living longer than ever and, and that's especially women. So that women living longer also without their partner now. So that's one; it's just a general demographic shift. The second one is, and this is something that hasn't been written about, but it's something that I notice in my conversation on the podcast in, in the solo community and then just more broadly, and that is, singlehood begets singlehood in the following way.
There was a time that if you were 35 years old and living in a neighborhood, you might be the only single person of your age in that neighborhood. That is that everybody got married. It just was what you did. It was commonly accepted. It was the default and it, it started off you got married earlier, and now we have, obviously, the age of first marriage is approaching 30 now again, contributing to, to the rise of singles. But now, especially in urban areas, you can very easily find lots of other single people your age, living a diverse set of lifestyles and not defaulting into the norm of family, of marriage of children, and so on. And, of course, because of technology, it's easier than ever to connect with those people. Uh, that's there. And so you have role models. You have mentors, you have friends who live the same lifestyle, and there's less pressure to couple up in order to fit in this there, the third. And you alluded to it at the beginning in your introduction and that is the rise of singles coincides with the rise of women, what we're finding in the United States and in other developed nations, in particular, is that first of all, women are experiencing a lot less pressure to marry. They're given greater access to education. So the majority of college students in the United States, whether it be undergraduate or postgraduate, are women. And also, women are having greater and greater opportunities economically in the workforce. And it just happens to be the case that if you give women access to education and access to good jobs, some of them decide to live a different life in particular because they don't have to rely on a man anymore to make their way.
It wasn't that long ago in the United States that if you were a woman, you either lived at home with your parents. And if you want to leave the familial house, you got married. Moreover, the invention of birth control has been a game-changer for women. And that is that a pregnancy could sideline a promising educational opportunity, a promising career, and thus is giving women more and more choice to live the life that they want to live, how they want to live it. And as a result, women are staying single longer or not marrying at all, And if they get divorced and if they're widowed, deciding not to remarried because they have greater opportunities that are there.
[00:07:35] Amanda: Peter, I hear you mentioning the word solo as well as the word single, but they are not interchangeable or one in the same. So can you tell us a little bit more about this?
[00:07:46] Peter: Yes. So the solo project and the solo movement, more generally is about positivity. The average single person feels incomplete. They feel like they need to partner up in order to achieve something worthwhile in life. And if that doesn't happen, they often feel bad. They're embarrassed. They feel guilty. They feel ashamed. Solos, on the other hand, have transformed themselves from singles, have embraced autonomy, and recognize that a partner may be welcome, but a partner will not complete them. A partner will compliment them. And so the solo mentality is that of opportunity of positivity, not just autonomy, but also adventure. And so I think that singles benefit from a positive message, a message of opportunity and, and what I want our organizations, employers, CEOs, entrepreneurs, salespeople, human resource managers to recognize similarly, the opportunities in singles or as I call them solos.
[00:09:02] Amanda: So Peter, you mentioned this rise in singles, but also this rise in solo households. Can you tell us more about that?
[00:09:10] Peter: Yes. So this is super fascinating, I think. I mean, some of it obviously is being fueled by the rise of. But single people don't necessarily have to live alone. They could live with roommates that could live with family. And so on, the short answer of this is that it's never been easier to live alone than it is today. Some of that has to do with urbanization. So people coming back into the cities and city living being tailored to single-living apartments, condos, and so on. Another one is the rise of innovation that there are now products and services out in the world that are designed to help people live a more convenient in life that are time-saving that are energy-saving. So, for example, there was a time that if you want to clean clothes, you had to go to the river and beat your clothes with a rock. And if you were a farmer, you had to divide that labor, someone worked the fields, and someone headed to the river center.
Now, obviously, with the rise of, of industrialization suburbanization, you have inventions like washers and dryers. Those very same washers and dryers make a single person's life easier, but now you don't even need a washer and dryer. you can leave your laundry outside your front door, and a service will pick it up, wash it, dry it, fold it and deliver it back to you in a way that is relatively inexpensive and especially allows you to do other things. And there's a host of this other sort of time and energy saving innovations that are out there– meal kits, housekeeping, and then also you're even finding ways in the marketplace to lower costs. So, for example, across the street from the building that I live in, there is a new building being built, which is going to have micro-apartments in it that is specifically tailored for solos. So these are smaller footprint apartments, but then bigger communal spaces. And so you can now live in the city in a nice apartment. It happens to be smaller, but it is more affordable in that sense. And so again, what we're finding is the marketplace I'll be at slowly is responding and allows people to then make the choice if they want to live on their own to do so. There was a time where it was just was too difficult to do.
[00:11:43] Amanda: You know, as we think about the marketplace, let's shift directions for a moment because some of your research centers around the nature of work and how singles can work differently in terms of shifts, hours, and other factors. And you've also worked to advocate for a better workplace environments that meet single people where they're at, which doesn't necessarily mean paying them more. So tell us a little bit more about this. You know, how much of a focus do you think companies should place on recruiting single people, and then how can they make their workplace a better place for singles to work?
[00:12:16] Peter: Absolutely. I think this is a fascinating topic. And again, one that is overlooked and more important than ever. So with historically low unemployment rates, you have more and more employers competing for high-quality workers. And one of the things that's very clear about the research is people don't solely work for money. That there's a host of other factors that matter in terms of recruiting and retaining your employees and especially recruiting and retaining the best employees because they're the ones who are most likely to leave. And so, what you're finding, though, is that a lot of workplaces are sort of slow to adapt in part because they have this legacy belief about the nuclear family, which is on the decline. And yet we have this rise of singles. And so just mathematically, it makes sense that if you're seeking to recruit and retain workers, singles are a good opportunity, but they may have different needs, and they are certainly treated differently in the workplace. So, for example, one thing that people care a lot about is the notion of equal treatment and respect within the workplace. And one of the things that happens with singles a lot, and I talked to folks who, who discuss this and lament this and that is there's often less respect for a single person's personal endeavors compared to a parent.
And what happens is as a result of that, if you have a child, it's easy to get off work, it's easy to ask someone to cover for a shift because this is an important endeavor. Well, who gets asked to cover the shift, who gets asked to work late, and that is the solo, the single person because presumably, you don't have anything better to do with your time. You know, even just something as simple as there's going to be a picnic that's happening. First of all, when that picnic happens, guests who's allowed to be invited– families, but I can't invite my friend people. Like why did you invite your friend? And while everybody goes home to get their family, who gets asked to cover the shifts. And so that can create a tension and a feeling like, “Oh, I'm not as valued in this, in this place.” Moreover as a result of this, statistically, singles tend to work more than their, their partnered peers. Some of that has to do for the reasons I've just discussed. And then some of that has to do with, they lack some of the natural boundaries, uh, that happen. I got to get home, you know, to family, I got to go pick up my kids, et cetera.
Moreover, there's research that I find really to be disturbing in that is that for example, new fathers often get pay raises without a commensurate increase in the value that they provide. It's just seen as, oh, they have more need. Is there, but of course, you know, any human resource professional or manager will tell you, you should compensate people, not based upon their need, but based upon their value to the organization based upon their performance this year. So that could be really morale debilitating for your, for your singles. And I think much of this is not even considered. It's just not overt discrimination. You know, this just fits the norms of the day. And in many ways fits the natural challenges that that family, uh, workers have to, to face.
[00:16:04] Amanda: Now, Peter, there is another area you have identified that highlights the differential between workers with families and single people.
[00:16:10] Peter: The second issue is there's an asymmetry in benefits that is that singles and non-singles have different desires for what their benefits may be. So I'll give you an example of this, you know, the average family person. You know, often welcomes a nine-to-five Monday through Friday schedule because their kids are on a similar schedule and their partners on a similar schedule. And they want to be able to have their nights and weekends free. But if you're single, you don't have to adhere to a Monday through Friday nine-to-five schedule, and thus, you may be interested in working other times as a single person. I would regularly spend Saturday night in the office. Not because I don't have a life, but because Saturday night is the busiest night to go out and I'd rather catch up on some work. The time spent in my office on a Saturday night is no less valuable than time spending in the office on Monday morning at 10:00 AM. And yet managers are often will judge a person's performance based upon whether they're present rather than based upon results again, which is what you should be basing performance on. Moreover, a lot of workplaces are built into suburban office parks with long commutes, again being close to suburban families. Often singles like I don't have to be home. I can work anywhere and thus are desiring remote work more often, for example. The last thing is that the benefits that are offered to employees, which are in addition to a salary and often a very important element of work, is often built with families in mind.
So, for example, a single person gets healthcare, a married person gets healthcare for themselves and for their family. So they get a differential benefit. And what is not often considered as well what other benefit might the single person get in order to keep compensation in terms of benefits to be equal? Another example of this is, for example, bereavement leave. So almost every employer allows bereavement leave for a family member, but very few allow it for a friend. And yet for a single person, friends may be serving the same role. They have a family of choice. This is especially the case for LGBTQ plus. Employees who tend to be more often to be single and are less likely to be connected to family for a variety of reasons. So, for example, you could be thinking yourself, well, what do you do about this? Well, I have a pretty easy solution. If you're an HR professional if you're a manager. Um, what you do is you create a cafeteria-style menu of benefits, and you allow people to select from them. So, for example, any good employers should offer parental leave. That's a no-brainer, but if you're single and don't have plans to have a family again, you don't have access to that benefit. You should be able to choose something else from the menu, such as an ability to have a sabbatical, to work on your personal or professional development, or maybe you should be able to choose pet insurance. Since you're not having health insurance, that's going to a partner and children, and you could imagine a whole variety of these different things, which is you get to choose the set of benefits that work best for you up into some potential limit.
[00:19:50] Amanda: So it sounds like workplaces still have a lot of outdated biases against single people. What are some ways this biases is baked into institutions even today?
[00:19:59] Peter: Yeah, certainly. So one, for example, is family leave. As I was saying, any good workplace has parental leave, but people often now exist outside of just that little nuclear family with regard to an extended family or even a family of choice. So 70% of companies only offer paid family leave to employees with children. So it's limited to that small group. Now, one of them biases against singles is they're seen as selfish. That is that they're not willing to lean in and do the hard work of raising a family and settling down and growing up. And that couldn't be further from the truth. Singles disproportionately donate their time and money to charity. They're more involved in their communities, and they're especially likely to be a sole caregiver to an elderly parent. And the reason this happens is you have two siblings. Mom gets sick, and the sibling with a family. I don't have the bandwidth to do this. I need you to do this. And that's what happens is the single child steps up and takes care of mom or dad under that policy. You can't take time off from work and be paid for that. And so, an inclusive employer recognizes that there's a need for family leave. I'll give you another example. If you're in the US military and you get married, you get a raise. You're not giving more responsibility. You just get a raise for having a family, and you can imagine how that just doesn't seem fair and how it creates a not-so-subtle pressure to do this thing because it is being externally rewarded.
[00:22:00] Amanda: Where does this idea of singles being selfish even come from?
[00:22:04] Peter: This notion that singles are selfish is actually related to the perceptions of how single spend their personal time. And so, if you have a family, if you're married, there's no justifying what you do with your free time. There's no negative assumptions about what you do with your free time. But people may assume that a single employee spends their free time frivolously, that is, they're out partying. They're having a good time. They're just sitting and Netflix, you know, and chilling all the time. And maybe that makes you a little bit jealous, but that's not necessarily the truth. First of all, I will say this as a little public service announcement. It doesn't matter how someone spends their free time, as long as they're performing well in the office. Again, this should be a results-oriented work environment, but that said that selfish, single stereotype doesn't hold up to scrutiny. For example, singles are more likely to donate their time and money to charity than to non-singles. They're more involved in their community. They have greater friendship networks.
As I've mentioned, they are more likely to caregive an elderly parent. Many singles talk about their disinterest in having a family, not because they're out there partying and living it up in the world, but they have concerns about the future. They don't want to contribute to climate change. And so what are they doing with their time? Instead, they are often contributing to the arts, to the sciences, to entertainment, again, the time and energy, and focus that would have gone to a family is going to these other types of endeavors. And so I think it's unfair to assume that about single people and then to punish them by asking them to do extra. Again, the overarching takeaway I think, should be people care about fairness. They want their workplace to be a meritocracy. And so anything that gets in the way of those two features can hurt morale and can say, “Oh, this is not the right place for me.” Which again works against a place that's looking to recruit and retain the best.
[00:24:33] Amanda: You've made a compelling case for why managers and HR should shift their priorities to recognize the importance of single people in the workplace. Similarly, how should businesses think about this growing demographic from a consumer perspective?
[00:24:47] Peter: Before I made the case for how singles might be a solution. Let's talk about why they're an important solution. So, if you run a business, you care about growth, short-term or long-term. In the short term, you have the natural competitive forces that exists in the marketplace, lots of people fighting over the same customers. In the long run, you're seeing demographic shifts, ones that can be concerning about overall growth. So we've mentioned some of those, a lower birth rate, for example, a graying population. I believe that singles are a solution to both of those problems. One is the demographics are shifting towards singles. There are more of them than ever, and they're going to continue to grow. Singles beget singles. Innovation helps foster this, the growth of solo households, and so on. In the short run, because most companies, most entrepreneurs, most CEOs still think about this legacy family structure as being the dominant one in society. They default into looking to serve that group. Again, overlooking this demographic shift. So once you recognize that singles are a potentially useful target market and no one else is, it gives you an opportunity to grow and to grow as this group grows.
[00:26:29] Amanda: So now that you've laid the groundwork there, how might a company do this?
[00:26:35] Peter: So the low-hanging fruit, the easiest thing is to recognize that you already have single customers and that you're not doing a good job communicating to them. For example, student organizations have gotten very good at representing the diversity of customers that they have, right? So not all of their advertisements feature straight white people, as they used to. My encouragement is, look for opportunities to portray your product or service in the hands, hearts, and minds of a single person. I'll give you an example of this. If you sell ice cream, one of the things that you have, I hope, figured out is that ice cream sales don't diminish when the weather gets cold, counterintuitively. And when you look into that, what you find is that people buy ice cream as kind of a nesting phenomenon, sitting under their blanket, watching Netflix, and indulging themselves in a comforting kind of way. Well, not all of those people are surrounded by 2.5 kids and a spouse, right? That person is sitting home alone. And yet good luck finding that portrayal in a print ad or a television ad. Uh, last one is, it's just amazing how many cars are just filled with people. And yet the average car is being driven by one person and one person alone. And as we know, half of those adults are solo. And so, looking for opportunities to show the full array in the same way that you're demonstrating the diverse customers that you have recognized the diverse customers that are coming in the form of solos.
[00:28:42] Amanda: Those are great examples for companies that already have products, but what about companies that have an opportunity to develop a product with a single in mind?
[00:28:51] Peter: Indeed. So let's start with the car one. This is a fascinating case study, so it is very difficult to innovate when it comes to car design in part because it's so heavily regulated. And moreover, it's very expensive to change from an existing structure. There's a company out there called Electra Meccanica, and they have a car it's actually not technically a car. They call it a vehicle called the Solo. So it's an electric vehicle with one seat in it. Um, and it's built on motorcycle technology rather than automobile technology. So it's a three-wheel vehicle that runs off a battery. And it's designed as you might imagine for the solo, whether it be the solo commuter or for the single person, more generally. I think that this is really groundbreaking because it has a lower price point. It fits also that solo mentality; perhaps the person who cares about the environment wants to lower their footprint, deciding not to have a family, for example. And that is something that is geared specifically, ideally, to a, um, to a single owner.
Moving on, the obvious stuff is what's called shrinkage. You just take your existing product, and you make it smaller because, you know, people who live solo tend to live in smaller households, they have less stores space. They don't have as much as many cupboards. They also don't have as many mouths for perhaps consuming this. So, one of the laments I have when I talk to singles is I don't want to buy a loaf of bread. Right. A full loaf of bread is just too much bread. It's going to get stale before I can finish it. And so how do you work out the packaging, the serving sizes to be ideal for your, um, your audience? I'll give you an example of this. When I buy chicken, sometimes I can find it in individually wrapped chicken breast patties. And so you buy like six of them, and when you open one, you're only opening one versus the old school, there are three patties in a container. And so now you can open one for dinner tonight, leave two in the fridge, and the remaining three go in the freezer. Right? So just a simple packaging change suddenly makes your product more appealing. And then the last one I'll give you is a really fascinating one. It's a Japanese company called Ichiban. And they serve delicious ramen, and Ichiban has done something in which they have spearheaded solo dining. Now they've done this under the auspice of dining alone allows you to concentrate on the flavor of their delicious ramen, but really the business model is much more advanced than that.
And that is the way that Ichiban works is they have, um, solo booths. So one-person booths, very minimal interaction with the server. And what they have found is that they turn their tables over faster. So solo diners eat 20% faster than non-solo diners. Because they're not conversing, they're not, they're not hanging out. They're not lingering. They eat, and then they go. And so they've created this mutually beneficial restaurant concept, which again, caterers to a sizeable proportion of the population is more profitable because they turn over their tables faster and is more comfortable because when you walk into an Ichiban restaurant, they don't say just one as if there's something wrong with you. They're happy that you're just one.
[00:33:12] Amanda: Thank you for those really interesting examples and case studies therein. As we think about wrapping up here, our final question is, who else could benefit from changing their focus to better serve singles?
[00:33:27] Peter: Well, I'm glad you asked that because I think that I'll talk about two areas that I think are really overlooked. I mean, the easy answer is any organization that has single members, customers, et cetera. One place is churches, right? So, you know, we've had a decrease in religiosity in the United States. There is a lot of competition for churchgoers, and smart churches are embracing marketing techniques, that is, they're looking to eliminate the pain points associated with going to church. I think one of the things is that if you're single, you often feel left out of the church community because it's so family-focused because so many of the meetups and so many of the offerings are related to, uh, to families. And yet single people become families. You don't want to lose them before that happens. And then some people remain single indefinitely but still want a spiritual experience. So I think that pastors, rabbis and priests, and so on can shift some of their attention to make a more inclusive environment for this rising demographic. The other group that comes to mind is that of politicians, policymakers, the government, so much policy and so much conversation around policy and campaigning is around the family. And yet the struggles that families have are often the same struggles the single people have. And so using more inclusive language can help not only bring people into the voting booth but then also to garner support for new policies. And new initiatives that are designed to make the world a better place.
[00:35:33] Amanda: Every episode, we have an LBIdea or a key takeaway. For a lot of listeners, it's going to be that they're not alone. It's totally normal to be single or solo. And there are even a lot of benefits. And that's why businesses shouldn't overlook this demographic either. Either as employees or in the marketplace. How are people responding to this, this message that singles are not alone and that there are other people out there like them.
[00:36:02] Peter: I'm glad you asked this, Amanda because the idea that you may be solo but not alone is what drives me. I've never received as many text messages, phone calls, social media messages, emails thanking me for doing this work. For example, I talked about how half of American adults are single. Half of those single adults are not interested in dating or relationship at the moment. And if you're one of those people, you feel strange, you feel out of place in the world, and yet it is just as likely that someone wants this as doesn't want it. And that is incredibly empowering for people because it reinforces a choice that they've made to help them live their remarkable life.
[00:36:54] Amanda: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Peter, for joining us today.
[00:36:58] Peter: My pleasure.
[00:37:01] Amanda: Thank you again for listening to Leeds Business Insights, and a special thank you to my guest, Dr. Peter McGraw. Don't miss a single episode. Subscribe to Leeds Business Insights wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.
The Leeds Business Insights podcast offers a cutting-edge perspective of trending topics, along with actionable insights from faculty, alumni and global leaders, to help you navigate the evolving world of business.
We invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, read about our latest episodes or listen to the most recent podcast below.