Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley joins Seana Smith to discuss the surge for work from home supplies, as more Americans stay at home during the coronavirus.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to "Yahoo Finance." For the first time, a majority of the US workforce is now working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic. And if you're like me, you've probably had to buy some new equipment in order to be able to best do your job from home. So joining us now to talk more about this is Dan Howley. And Dan, I know people are buying up equipment at a pretty staggering rate in order to be better equipped to work from home. What are the items that people are most looking into at this point?

DAN HOWLEY: Yes, so we reached out to Target, Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart, and so far we've only heard back from Best Buy and Walmart. But what they're saying is really interesting. A lot of people obviously buying webcams to do things like this video chat, as well as laptops, printers, things along those lines, because people generally seem to be relying on their office provided equipment while they're there, but not at their home. They need their own equipment to work.

So that's really where we're seeing that uptick. According to NPD Group which has been tracking this, in the three weeks that started in March, they saw upticks of 138% for people purchasing monitors, 179% for webcams, 134% for headsets, 40% for PCs-- that's desktops and notebooks-- and 118% increase for docking stations, and that's so you can have multiple devices connected to your laptop.

And I spoke to Best Buy again, and outside of just the devices that they're seeing, they're also seeing upticks in refrigeration units that are being purchased by people, because they're buying so much food that they need extra places to store it, and that just goes to the kind of hoarding aspect of what's going on as far as consumers and the grocery store go. But really interesting numbers from a lot of these people, and obviously, as more and more cities and states start to lock down, we'll likely see similar increases as well.

SEANA SMITH: And what about those that are looking to maintain their Wi-Fi connections? Because some-- I mean, you don't have to look any further than my connection. Sometimes it drops out. How can you better connect to your Wi-Fi in general?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, really, I would say that there's two main things that you should do is check what your internet speed is that you're paying for. So if you're doing anything below 25 megabits per second, that's below broadband according to the federal standard, and even that might be a little too low to be considered broadband really. What I would do is look at what you're paying for, and then if you're in a home with multiple devices, upgrade to 100 megabits per second.

And then if you want to get a little extra bougie and you want to stream like 4K video, do 200 megabits per second. And then the second, and this one is pretty easy, stop hiding your router. It might be ugly. A lot of companies recognize that, so they're trying to make them look a lot nicer. But when you have it out in the open on a shelf or something like that, not hidden behind a TV, or monitor or on the floor, you're going to get a much better connection.

You can think about the router as the center of a circle, and that circle encompasses your range of effective internet connectivity. If you hide that on the floor, you're making that circle kind of smaller so it's not going to be able to get around walls and things like that, so keep it up. And then my personal recommendation is if you have a large house, by a mesh router network. That comes usually with two to three different nodes that give you connectivity throughout your home. I set it up, my wife and I, for my father-in-law, and he has no problem getting connectivity from a router upstairs to one that's in the middle floor, and now he has Netflix in the basement where he can hang out. So it really does help a lot.

SEANA SMITH: I'm going to take note of some of those things to put in place. All right, Dan Howley