There are angry ladies all over Yankee Candle’s site reporting that none of the candles they just got had any smell at all. I wonder if they’re feeling a little hot and nothing has much taste for the last couple days too.
— Terri Nelson (@TerriDrawsStuff) November 24, 2020
The earliest symptoms of COVID-19 we heard of were cough and fever. Then word spread that many victims reported a loss of their sense of smell. All these months later, symptoms vary widely, from none to severe, and the disease affects people in so many ways that many are infected without even knowing it. So is it any surprise that people who purchase scented Yankee Candles may be upset that they can't smell them?
Kate Petrova saw the Tweet by Terri Nelson and went to work crunching the numbers.
Could it be because of the COVID-related loss of smell? To investigate, I plotted the reviews of the 3 most popular unscented candles on Amazon*, and the difference was quite striking 3/n
— Kate Petrova (@kate_ptrv) November 27, 2020
*One thing to note: fewer reviews are available for unscented candles than for scented ones pic.twitter.com/D9NdknJJAU
Petrova has more graphs that show a striking correlation between complaints over scentless candles and the spread of COVID in the US. Read the rest at Twitter or at Threadreader. -via Metafilter