COVID-19 and Retail Grocery Management: Insights from a Broad-based Consumer Survey

ABSTRACT

As one of the few operating retail sectors, the food retail industry is encountering unique challenges and opportunities during the 2019 Novel Coronavirus. The pandemic led to various transformations in the food retail industry, including changes in consumers perception and behavior. Although the pandemic has a situational nature, such transformations could have both temporary and long-lasting effects on reforms of the grocery retail industry. We examined consumers retail grocery shopping behaviors change during the pandemic using a survey among 2,500 U.S. adults. Survey results show that consumers now have higher expectations for in-store safety;they have reduced the frequency of store patronage, travel time, and in-store duration;they have shifted shopping schedule and shopping destinations;and they have spent more per shopping trip. The increased spending in-store also paralleled with the expanded transactions across various online grocery shopping platforms, which created a perfect competition in the emerging online grocery retail industry. Such perfect competition is unique in the overall monopoly ecommerce world and it creates new opportunities for platforms to reform and co-develop a sustainable online grocery retailing industry. We further came up with managerial implications in short- and long-term for the brick-and-mortar stores as well as online grocery vendors. IEEE