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Canadians Still Prefer To Buy Their Groceries ‘In Person’

The latest ‘State of Retail’ report for 2024 is out. I, as an old-school shopper and cook, found some of the grocery-related results surprising. But it didn’t surprise me that most folks still want to ‘squeeze the tomatoes’…

Loblaws Store - © 2023 - retailtouchpoints.comBricks-and-mortar supermarkets not likely to disappear any time soon…

The Lightspeed Commerce Inc. Report is the first of a whole cavalcade of such annual analyses to appear, late in each calendar cycle or in the weeks immediately following New Year’s. And it usually tells an accurate, if approximated take. The company polled 2,500 shoppers aged 18 and up…

Shopping trends

Retailers of all stripes are always eager to see the results of the annual Lightspeed State of Retail report. This year, it’s a tale of differentiation by generation. But all age groups appear to agree on one thing: The majority want to keep doing their regular shopping in bricks-and-mortar stores. And that goes double for grocery purchases…

In fact, more Canadians (64 percent) than Americans (55 percent) expressed their desire to shop in local stores.

“Seventy four percent of survey respondents agreed that shopping local was important to them,” Canadian Grocer emphasized, “with 71 percent citing food and beverage as their number one priority for shopping local.”

Marked generational differences

The spread across all age groups polled was marked. While 80 percent of shoppers over the age of 55 said they preferred to shop in local stores, only 59 percent of the youngest group, Gen Zs, agreed.

Bucking the trends

These results seem to buck the trends being reported for growth in online shopping. Online grocery sales in the US were up 8.9 percent year over year this past August (the latest period for which fig-ures were available).

But that was 8.9 percent of what is still a very small share of the over grocery market. Although shop-pers can order online for delivery to their doorstep from all categories of grocery products, only packaged foods and non-food items are enjoying significant online sales.

My take

This is just my opinion. And that of friends and family I’ve asked. Erin and I have also polled a num-ber of ‘friendly’ grocery store checkout clerks about what kind of shopping trends they’ve observed in-store.

The overwhelming reply we received to the online vs. local question was, “Folks still want to shop ‘in person’ for most foods, particularly fresh produce and meats. They want to be able to choose their own specific tomatoes and apples and avocados. They want to select fruits and veggies according to their own personal criteria for ripeness and freshness. And they want to be able to see EXACTLY what they’re getting when they shell out big bucks for meat.”

As hard as the supermarket brands try, it appears they still have a steep up-hill climb ahead of them to convert a significant proportion of their customers to online shopping from in-store, in person purchasing…

Reading between the lines, the message of the Lightspeed report is telling grocers, “It will be a long time before bricks-and-mortar supermarkets go the way of the clothing, book, music, home decor, and other stores that abandoned the malls, as shoppers succumbed to the lure of online retailers led by Amazon…”

~ Maggie J.