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A year into the pandemic, and just as vaccines were rolling out in March, we wanted to know how people’s shopping habits changed and what would stick in the After Times. For one, most Americans we surveyed with Harris Poll said they would prefer to shop in person.
Now, with the rise of the Delta variant, we wanted to see if the optimism is still there. So we teamed up with Harris Poll again to run an exclusive, representative survey of 2,046 US adults.
IRL’s return
Brick and mortar’s comeback has been sustained, and is projected to increase whenever the pandemic wanes: 71% of Americans shop in person at least once a week. That figure was 70% when we asked in March.
- 63% of respondents will do most of the shopping in person a year from now, compared with 37% who said online. The split was 43% in person and 24% for online in our previous survey.
- 25% of Americans said they now make big ticket purchases in person, compared with 18% when asked the same question a few months ago. However, that figure jumps to 66% when people were asked about a year from now.
- The Delta variant could stymie traffic to malls and department stores—as less than half (43%) of shoppers surveyed go to those locations. But that’s up from 32% in March.
Stocked up
We all remember the great toilet paper craze of 2020. Well, it seems consumers are still stockpiling the essentials, albeit to a lesser extent.
Three out of four Americans reported stockpiling toilet paper at the outset of the pandemic, and the figure was still as high as 69% last month. Slightly more respondents (63%) said they stockpiled water last month, compared with the beginning of the pandemic (61%).
- 76% of shoppers loaded up on cleaning supplies last year, compared with 63% in July.
- Despite elevated meat prices, 46% of Americans said they stockpiled meat last month, compared with 39% at the start of the pandemic.
Is the price right? Nearly half of Americans (47%) say they are much or somewhat more sensitive to prices because of the pandemic.
- And there’s a generational divide: 47% of Boomers say they’re at least somewhat more sensitive compared with 37% of millennials.
Notably, 44% of respondents said they’re neither more or less sensitive to price changes. But we wonder if they do care about shrinking package sizes—another way CPG companies raise prices.—KM