{"id":585374,"date":"2026-08-15T09:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T09:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/585374\/"},"modified":"2026-08-15T09:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T09:34:08","slug":"on-a-popular-south-korean-online-marketplace-more-strollers-were-sold-for-pets-than-for-babies-in-the-first-three-quarters-of-2023-57-percent-pet-43-percent-baby-against-33-percent-pet-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/585374\/","title":{"rendered":"On a popular South Korean online marketplace, more strollers were sold for pets than for babies in the first three quarters of 2023 \u2014 57 percent pet, 43 percent baby, against 33 percent pet only two years earlier"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Gmarket, one of South Korea\u2019s largest online retailers<\/a>, pet strollers made up 57 percent of all strollers sold in the first three quarters of 2023, against 43 percent for baby strollers. It was the first time on the platform that carriages for pets outsold the ones for babies.<\/p>\n

The easy version of this story writes itself: Koreans are swapping babies for dogs. The truer version is messier, because it\u2019s really two separate trends that happened to cross on one line of a sales chart.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth being precise about what Gmarket actually said. The pet share climbed from 33 percent in 2021 to 36 percent in 2022 to 57 percent in 2023<\/a>. The baby share fell from 67 to 64 to 43 over the same window. The pet share jumped more than 20 points in a single year.<\/p>\n

One caveat: the 57\/43 figure covers the first three quarters of the year, not the full twelve months. It\u2019s a real crossover, just a narrower window than the round headline can imply.<\/p>\n

The baby side of the ledger<\/p>\n

Fewer baby strollers is the expected half. South Korea\u2019s fertility rate, the average number of children a woman would be expected to have over her lifetime if that year\u2019s age-specific rates continued, fell to 0.72 in 2023, down from 0.78 in 2022<\/a>. That was the world\u2019s lowest rate that year, far below the roughly 2.1 replacement level in a population without migration. In Seoul the rate was lower still: 0.55 in 2023<\/a>, the lowest of any region in the country.<\/p>\n

Korea reported 230,000 births in 2023<\/a>, 19,200 fewer than the year before, a 7.7 percent decrease. Fewer babies born means fewer families in the market for a baby stroller.<\/p>\n

A quick note on where we\u2019re standing. We\u2019re not demographers or economists, and this is reading and reflection on the reporting, not a diagnosis of why a country stopped having children. The population figures are national statistics; almost everything downstream of them is contested.<\/p>\n

The pet side, and what a stroller signals<\/p>\n

The other half is a pet economy that has been growing fast. The agriculture ministry put the sector at 8 trillion won in 2022<\/a>, while the government set a target of 15 trillion won by 2027<\/a>. The ministry also counted about 6.02 million households raising dogs or cats in 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, for a healthy pet, a stroller is usually a discretionary purchase and can signal the shift analysts describe as pet humanization or pet parenting.<\/p>\n

Dog-stroller sales have quadrupled since 2019, while a top-end Airbuggy model was priced around $1,100<\/a>. Yoon Hyun-shin, head of Pet Friends, said<\/a>: \u201cPet ownership is rising, and so is spending on pets as people choose them over children.\u201d That\u2019s an industry executive\u2019s interpretation, and the claim that people are choosing pets over children is exactly the part that deserves caution. It may be true for some households. It\u2019s an assertion, not a measured fact.<\/p>\n

What the crossover proves, and what it doesn\u2019t<\/p>\n

It is tempting to read the stroller figure as a country swapping dogs for babies, one for one. Kim Moon-soo, South Korea\u2019s labor minister, said in 2023<\/a>: \u201cWhat I worry about is young people not loving each other. Instead, they love their dogs and carry them around,\u201d adding that young people were not marrying or having children.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What the figure actually shows is two numbers moving in opposite directions. The baby side is shrinking because there are fewer babies. The pet side is growing alongside rising pet ownership and spending. A ratio can flip when both halves move, without either half telling you that one caused the other.<\/p>\n

The data do not show that people buying a dog stroller are people who would otherwise have had a child. Many young adults cite housing, education and child-rearing costs among their reasons for delaying or forgoing children<\/a>, but sharing a backdrop is not the same as one thing driving the other.<\/p>\n

A Korea story, or a preview<\/p>\n

So is this uniquely Korean? Partly.<\/p>\n

South Korea had the world\u2019s lowest fertility rate in 2023 and a fast-growing pet market, a combination that made the crossover arrive early and land hard. But later marriage, high housing and education costs, and greater spending on pets aren\u2019t confined to one country.<\/p>\n

Our read is that the stroller number is a good marker and a poor cause. It won\u2019t explain why South Korea\u2019s fertility rate collapsed, and it certainly didn\u2019t cause it. What it does is make an abstract trend physically visible: on one sales chart, the carriages built for pets quietly pulled ahead of the ones built for babies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

About this article<\/p>\n

This article is for general information and reflection. It is not medical, mental-health, or professional advice. The patterns described draw on published research and editorial observation, not clinical assessment. If you’re dealing with a serious situation, speak with a qualified professional or local support service.<\/p>\n

Standards<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tSpace Daily articles are edited and fact-checked before publication. We use AI tools in the newsroom. See our editorial standards<\/a> and masthead<\/a>.\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Gmarket, one of South Korea\u2019s largest online retailers, pet strollers made up 57 percent of all strollers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[85,46,141],"class_list":["post-585374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}