'The Barber of Seville' Lost to the At-Home Revolution 

The home of the famous barber...

I spent a weekend in the beautiful city of Seville, a city full of great history and kind people in the southern part of Spain. Its rivers to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic made it a center and gateway of commerce for Spain and the entire Iberian Peninsula. 

The city dates to the Roman Empire and the Phoenicians, making its establishment more than 2,000 years old. Seville built much of its wealth during the Islamic Caliphate, later populated heavily by Christians during the Middle Ages.

The Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See, otherwise known as Seville Cathedral, is enormous. It's the fourth largest church globally and an amazing feat of architecture and construction. You can see me standing in front of its massive front doors in the picture above. 

You can walk around the historic areas of Seville for hours... eating amazing tapas and drinking some fantastic local wines while doing so. 

It has captured the hearts of many people, including great, genius composers like Mozart and Rossini. They loved the city's charm and created great artistic works in the Seville setting. 

Rossini's The Barber of Seville is considered the first musical comedy and a great masterpiece of the opera genre... And Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, also set in Seville, is widely regarded as one of the greatest operas of all time. 

The protagonist, the barber, was one of the most powerful people in town in both operas...

Today, it would seem highly unlikely that the great blockbuster movie of the decade would be based on a barber. However, it was not at all strange just two hundred years ago. 

For more than a thousand years, the barber truly was one of the most important people in any town. While getting your hair cut may be as infrequent as every few weeks, getting a shave meant going to the barber every couple of days. 

During the Middle Ages and beyond, barbershops became central, high-traffic gatherings with frequent visits by any man hoping to look his best daily. They were hubs of exchanging information, news, and gossip of the day, making them the social nexus of any town. 

The barbers were often barber surgeons, making them the center of a town's health care. Note the red-and-white barber poles that still reflect their heritage as a place for healing wounds and bandages. 

While the barber's track record of importance spanned centuries, even commanding the lead roles in great operas, that influence ended abruptly. 

It fell to the advent of the Gillette razor. It was created by King C. Gillette. And the At-Home Revolution in shaving caused a massive drop in barber visit frequency. 

Going from shaving to mainly just haircuts killed the barber's foot traffic, and with that, the barber lost its special place as a hub of information. 

The pandemic's impact on changing lifestyle trends over the last two years is a lesson for today's industries...

In July 2020, more than 16,000 pizza shops and restaurants closed. And at the other end of the scale, Domino's Pizza (DPZ), with no in-room dining, grew its delivery business dramatically. DPZ stock is up by more than 40% since mid-March 2020. 

Previously well-known brands like Lord & Taylor and Pier 1 Imports shut their physical doors for good. 

Of course, Amazon's (AMZN) e-commerce business continues to grow. Less obvious is how Amazon's group focused on cloud-computing IT services, Amazon Web Services ("AWS"), has been growing like wildfire. 

Amazon is up more than 50% since early 2020 (and it was growing leaps and bounds before the pandemic). 

And at-home entertainment powerhouse Sonos (SONO) was up 204% when we told our readers to lock in their gains. 

As people's homes become centers for work, play, and even health care throughout their lives, continuous, constant power is necessary... 

Generac (GNRC) provides the backup generators to power the home when power outages occur and is up more than 200% since our recommendation in June 2020. 

The world didn't temporarily adjust for the pandemic... It has become a lifestyle change...

Once you realize how much of your lifetime of health care needs can be taken care of at home, why spend more time at a doctor's office other than medically necessary... 

The At-Home Revolution is in full swing, and much like the barber profession's fall from glory, things aren't going back to the way they were. 

While the beautiful city of Seville has stood the test of thousands of years, I don't recall seeing many barbers there. An At-Home Revolution indeed! 

At Altimetry, we've identified many companies that are profiting from the At-Home Revolution... several with triple-digit gains. 

But the At-Home Revolution isn't the only trend we're following... In my recent video presentation, I revealed one theme with a 96% proven success rate among the stocks we selected... and the average gain toppled nearly 760%. 

And I explain our methodology and the four magic words underlying this new trend right here in this video. 

Love, joy, and peace to you, 

Joel Litman
February 4, 2022