Today In Data: 55 Percent Of Consumers Shop For Groceries Both Online And Offline

grocery statistics

Today in PYMNTS data, Karen Webster discusses Amazon’s impact on consumers and grocery shopping as a whole.

“The gulf between what consumers want and what grocery stores today deliver as consumers move regularly between the online and offline worlds is pretty big,” Webster noted. “On a scale of zero to 100, where zero is, well, zero, and 100 is a perfect score, grocery stores scored a pretty lousy 30, based on consumer responses and a statistical analysis of store features and functionality.”

Here are the numbers:

$1 trillion | Yearly spend on U.S. grocery sales, counting Target, Walmart and Costco, compared to how much Americans spend online, which is little more than a speck on a flea’s eyelid right now — about 1 percent. That online sales data comes courtesy of two-year-old U.S. Census Bureau data and should be of about as much comfort to grocers as it is to department stores — particularly those still being told by the Bureau to believe that 92 percent of retail sales still happen in a physical store.

$7,203 | Amount consumers spend every year on food, amounting to 12.6 percent of American consumer spending, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More than 50 percent of that spend — $4,049 — was on food purchased at grocery stores to eat at home.

4,000 | Number of consumers surveyed by Vantiv, now Worldpay, for the PYMNTS Omni Usage Index™ Grocery edition about how they shop or pay for groceries today and how well their favorite grocers are doing to support the features they value most when shopping with them.

55 percent | Percentage of consumers now shopping comfortably across physical and online channels. That convenience could deny traditional grocery store businesses their profits, enough to hurt more than a little as consumers use mobile apps to cherry pick where to purchase and what to buy at the cheapest price.

30 percent | Portion of grocery shoppers who use a store’s mobile app as part of their grocery shopping process to check prices and see what’s on sale if they shop in a big store. Only one in 10 do so if their go-to grocery store is a smaller store.