Little and often

The shopping habits of a The Grocer journalist: If I’m not busy, I try and do a weekly shop at a supermarket every Sunday morning. There are a couple of products I buy at another supermarket. For everything else, I top-up shop from the convenience store at the end of my road, or pick up my lunch from a high street store on the way to work. 

It seems my shopping habits are far from unusual because new data released this morning has claimed shoppers are increasingly looking beyond the hypermarkets and supermarkets for their grocery shop. 

The Shoppercentric poll found 38% of shoppers were shopping at a wider variety of stores and 70% were using different stores or altering the frequency of shopping visits. 

The phrase ‘little and often’ was adopted largely by convenience operators in 2009/2010 to explain changing consumer shopping habits that saw shoppers choosing to shop locally more often to control their budgets. 

But as The Grocer revealed in May, this trend is not necessarily restricted to the convenience sector. Consumers may very well be shopping little and often, but they’re shopping in the channels most convenient to them. 

In essence – convenience is in the eye of the beholder. 

The Shoppercentric poll gives more weight to this argument. 

Although it found the lion’s share (89%) of shoppers used a supermarket or hypermarket for their grocery shopping in the past month, they also shopped at discounters (67%), convenience stores (52%), online (29%), in high street shops (21%) and indies (17%). 

It shows that shoppers will go to whatever channel they feel is most convenient for their needs. 

As IGD CEO Joanne Denney-Finch succinctly put it last month: “Shoppers now expect grocery retailing to organise itself around their lives rather than building their routines around store opening hours.”