U.S. grocery e-commerce sales continued to break records as they hit $7.2 billion in June, up 9 percent from May (which saw $6.6 billion in sales), according to a new Brick Meets Click/Mercatus Grocery survey announced today.
The survey, conducted between June 24 – 25, also found that 45.6 million households used delivery and curbside pickup for a larger portion of their grocery needs, and order frequency grew to 1.9 orders per month, up from 1.7 in May.
Online grocery shopping has had a big year, spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic and people sheltering in place. I was particularly interested to see what the June numbers would bring, as many states relaxed their lockdowns restrictions. However, despite re-openings, the coronavirus still loomed large over people’s shopping in June. From the Brick Meet Clicks press announcement:
In June, 44% of all households reported high levels of concern about someone in their household contracting COVID-19, up two percentage points from the previous month. The increase was almost entirely driven by a 9% increase among shoppers in the over-60 age segment since May.
Brick Meets Click noted that retailers of all sizes have been aggressive in expanding capacity to meet the demand for all this increased e-commerce. Anecdotally speaking, I’ve seen this play out where I live, as grocery stores big and small have both launched new online ordering platforms and carved out more space in the parking lot to fulfill pickup orders.
Will record-setting grocery e-commerce continue into the summer? There’s a good chance it will as the pandemic shows no signs of slowing down and restaurants are forced to shut down again. With three full months of pandemic quarantining in place, new habits have definitely formed. And all the confusion around opening/closing/partial opening, people could just force people to throw their hands in the air and stick with online grocery shopping for the rest of the year.
Leave a Reply