While I don’t typically chase store-to-store-to-store to do my weekly grocery shopping, each week I do go to a supermarket and a drugstore. Some days, if I’m out and about, I may visit several stores and pick the sales I am interested in from each. Yesterday was one of those days — I was going by both Dominick’s and Meijer, so I stopped at Dominick’s for cheap chicken and breakfast sausages, then headed to Meijer for toilet paper, yogurt, and other “10-for-$10” deals.
Unusual? Not really. The Boston Globe recently published an interesting article about the phenomenon of shopping around, and it states that 76% of Americans now shop at five different stores for their household needs:
NOT LONG AGO, I sat down at my dining room table to make a list of all the places I go grocery shopping. It quickly turned unsettling…
For stuff like boxes of pasta, cold cuts, and frozen food, we flip-flop between Stop & Shop (which is particularly close) and Market Basket (which is particularly cheap). Then we go to Costco for toilet paper and to a place in Lexington called Wilson Farm for fruit and vegetables. Setting a new low for laziness, we recently started getting heavy boxes of cat litter delivered from Amazon.com. When we need a gallon of milk, I drive to a nearby plaza that has a Trader Joe’s and a Walgreens, then choose whichever store is closer to my parking space.
Laying it out like that, it all seems excessive, even a little crazy — imagine the time I’d have for cooking if I spent less of it driving around. Who in the world shops this way?
Well, I’m happy to report, just about everyone. My family’s shopping style is “not unusual — in fact, it’s very normal,” John Rand assures me. He’s a senior vice president in the Cambridge office of Kantar Retail who has been working in and studying the industry for 45 years. “Consumers are splitting the ticket more than they ever did. They’re going to multiple outlets, not all of which are supermarkets, and sometimes even multiple supermarkets.”
Seventy-six percent of Americans now visit at least five “channels” for food — places like supermarkets, drug, and dollar stores — according to an August 2012 report from SymphonyIRI Group, a research firm in Chicago. Only 3 percent of us visit only one or two channels.
