If you read up on trends in business or home business, then you’ve probably seen quite a few articles recently on the pet industry. To put it briefly, more and more people are owning more and more pets. The figures are amazing, both in terms of numbers of pets owned and amounts spent on pets.
According to the APPMA (the American Pet Products Manufacturer’s Association), pet spending has more than doubled from $17 billion in 1994 to about $38.4 billion in 2006. And spending is not just on basics like food or routine veterinary care.
APPMAs National Pet Owners Survey shows 27% of dog owners and 13% of cat owners buy their pets birthday presents, and 55% of dog owners and 37% of cat owners buy their pet holiday presents. High-end retail goods and services such as pet spas and hotels, pet therapy and expanding veterinary services such as joint replacement surgeries and delicate eye procedures are becoming more
common.
Baby boomers (whose children have grown up) and young professional couples (who delay having children in favor of careers), are fuelling much of the growth in spending. They turn to pets to fill the void and often consider their...