Earlier this month, IBM released some interesting findings about grocery shoppers from its new study “Why Advocacy Matters to Grocers,” including:
- 73% of shoppers “feel either antagonistic towards or have no loyalty to their local supermarket”
- 46% feel antagonistic
- Among regular supermarkets, 27% of customers act as advocates, meaning they are “loyal customers who recommend their grocer to others, buy more from their grocer and stay with their grocer instead of going to the competition.” Among specialty supermarkets, however—where more emphasis is placed on delivering a quality shopping experience and an appropriate selection of products—advocacy goes up to 46%.
So what’s a poor grocery store to do when faced with so many indifferent or hostile shoppers? IBM (which has a vested interest in pushing its own customer data program) says,
Clearly the customer loyalty card efforts across the grocery industry have fallen short of their goals as grocers sacrifice customer experience to focus on lower prices.
Whether friend or foe, all shoppers identified the following attributes as important factors in how they feel about their grocer:
- quality
- selection
- employees
- product availability
- social responsibility
We would just appreciate it if the cashiers didn’t always treat us with theatrical displays of contempt when we check out. We’re also surprised there’s no mention of crowding or store layout—in NYC at least, the markets are almost always 1/5th the size of “normal” stores, and god help you if you go on a Saturday afternoon.
“IBM Survey Finds Grocery Industry Falls Short in Building Loyalty With Customers” [IBM via USA Today]
(Photo: Getty)
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Here in MA we have a local chain called Market Basket. People LOVE them because they know they’re not going to get screwed. Prices are always FAAAAR lower than other stores. To me, the only difference between this and a ‘dollar store’ is that they sell mostly all the same stuff you can get anywhere. The stores are kinda dingy and dated and they’re very cramped and crowded- but CHEAP!
Unfortunately in my part of the country, Food Lion has taken over. There’s also a Piggly Wiggly and Lowe’s Foods (and of course Wal-Mart but that’s neither here nor there), the former is never crowded and is dark and dismal and the latter is severely overpriced but has the widest selection and nicest staff of the three.
I absolutely deplore Food Lion, I guess the only upswing is that I haven’t sold my soul to Wal-Mart.
I’ve got a Giant, a Safeway, a Bloom, 3 local farmers markets and a Harris Teeter within 10 minutes of my house. If I’m willing to drive 15 minutes, I can also go to the local Latin/Asian grocery – Global Foods. I can’t do a full weeks’ grocery list at any ONE of those stores. So we end up rotating every week. During the farmer’s market season, we get most of our produce there, but otherwise, we’ll normally hit Bloom first, then later in the week either hit Harris Teeter’s or the Global Foods for everything we couldn’t find at Bloom. We save Giant/Safeway for when we’re in a rush and only have basic items (potatoes, milk, etc) on our list.
Harris Teeter is sneaky though. We shouldn’t shop there since their prices just aren’t nearly as good as any of the other stores, but they keep on doing things like giving great customer service, and smiling, and letting my son have a baby banana while we’re wending our way through the produce section. Their customer service seduces me into returning despite the prices. Otherwise, I’d probably limit myself to Bloom/Global Foods.
I live in Northern Virginia, and have a Giant, Safeway, Harris Teeter, Bloom, and Super Target about equally close to my house. Then, there’s a Shoppers Food Warehouse a couple miles further.
We’ve found that when we shop at any of those first 5 stores, we always end up being shocked at how high the total is when we check out. Their prices are all equally bad, except for occasional good sale prices.
When we shop at Shoppers, we’re usually pleasantly surprised when we see the total at checkout. When comparing receipts side-by-side for Shoppers versus those other stores, there’s not always an obvious difference. But we’re pretty sure that in the long run, we save money by doing most of our shopping there.
Costco charges $50/yr for membership now, and provides less value to me than they did when it was only $30/yr (about 6 years ago). I find that most things I buy at Costco could be found for just as cheap (or cheaper), and in smaller packages, at Shoppers Food Warehouse or, for non-food items, at Wal-mart. If you *ever* use coupons (we do) and/or buy generic products, then I can almost guarantee that you can save money using coupons at Shoppers/Wal-mart, rather than Costco.
I believe that Costco does provide some value, and it’s definitely better than buying brand-name merchandise at Giant, Safeway, Harris Teeter, Super Target, or Bloom. If you want to stock up and don’t want to bother dealing with coupons, Costco isn’t too bad.
The consumer/seller relationship is an adversarial one. The seller is doing everything possible to try to manipulate, trick, coerce, mislead the consumer into buying his goods. While the consumer is just trying to buy what he wants/needs at a decent price.
The deck seems to always be stacked in the favor of the seller (with marketing strategies, tricks of the trade & a whole industry devoted to find ways to manipulate the customer into spending his money). All consumers have is their wits & what info they can gleen from the net to get the best bang for their buck.
Let me give a perfect example…. when I am basically FORCED to walk nearly through half the store in a single winding corridor of products (that the store is trying to unload) before I can get to a spot where there is an aisle junction so that I can actually GO to where I want to within the store to get the items I specifically came for. I dont like feeling like I am a rat in a maze, manipulated & guided towards crap I dont want to buy.
What matters to me most is convienience, quality, selection, affordability…. what ever grocery store can offer the most of those… I will go to.
Re: people complaining about understaffed stores.
I work in a small regional chain as a cashier with slightly higher prices than the two larger competitors, one of which is Wal-Mart. Management claims to be customer service oriented, but they won’t hire any more baggers or cashiers than is necessary because they would have to raise prices. Also, a lot of the stockers and baggers either are high schools or started out as high schoolers, so they can get away with paying them less.
It’s thanksgiving week and we’re just so understaffed due to that. Some customers understand, but the holidays just make people more irritable. Such is life during the holidays.
Our options stink. We have Walmart, Hyvee or a small local chain.
Most of the local chain’s stores are tiny ghetto stores that carry lots of things like lard and pig knuckles, good luck finding a head of romaine at them. They do have one nice store in the McCastle part of town. It is small and overpriced but they have a decent onsite butcher and a few gourmet & organic items.
Walmart is just disgusting even for a Walmart.
Hyvee pretty much owns the town and they know it. Prices there are totally out of control.
What really annoys me about Hyvee is that their checkout staff are beyond rude. Ask them to bag in paper and they will look at you with contempt and ignore the request. It is a 50-50 shot if there will even be a bagger on your lane. When there isn’t the checkers pitch everything together into plastic and toss it to the end of the checkout thing. God forbid you bring your own bags. They do have self checkout but they are only set up for 10 items or less.
I find expired items on the shelf all the time and they will purposely leave rotting bagged lettuce on the shelves and just mark it down.
I can’t wait until Super Target gets here and hope maybe that SuperValue or Whole Foods might come to town.
I have nothing against my grocery store. But I’m not loyal. Why would I be? It’s easy to be loyal to the local grocer, when the owner walks around saying hello and you see him at church on Sunday. Much harder to be loyal to a national corporate chain that just exists to make money.
In western Massachusetts, we basically have two choices (aside from the tiny local stores and Costco-types, of course) Big Y and Stop and Shop. Though the Big Y has an awesome selection of produce and a fantastic bakery, I usually steer clear of it both because it’s all the way across town and because I’ve seen them raise prices before their legendary buy-one-get-one sales.
Stop and Shop has always had good prices, and their generics are great – I actually prefer them over the national brands on some items. Between the two Stop and Shops within a mile or two of my house, I have to admit I choose the one that’s a little more “ghetto.” The prices are the same and the selections are comparable, but the more upscale one rests in the middle of a huge twisted mass of parking lots and strip malls – I find navigating the parking lot to be a total pain in the ass, and I only go there when I have other business in the area.
I’m extremely loyal to Wegman’s. Really nice high-end stuff (dry aged beef, excellent cheeses, exotic produce in excellent condition) along with really low prices on regular groceries. The other groceries around here are Giant, SuperFresh, Shopper’s Warehouse and Mars, and none of them even comes close to Wegman’s on price or quality.
The only other store I shop at is the Asian market for some produce and Thai and Chinese groceries.
I like shopping at my local Wegman’s, but they’re sorely testing my loyalty. The store is constantly being rearranged and the aisles have sprouted HUGE end-cap displays that have narrowed the lateral aisles at both ends of the store way too much.
What used to be a well-laid out store has become crowded and difficult to navigate.
Wegman’s consistently places in the Top 100 places to work so I know they’re doing something right, but they need to spend a little more time training the staff. I’ve taken to bagging my own groceries after finding cans of soup on top of lettuce too many times. While we’re on the subject, whatever happened to baggers?
I love you, Wegmans.
Oh, to have one store to do all my grocery shopping! (Chicago Northwest suburbs) I have to go to Whole Foods once a week or so because they have great selection for vegetarian items. For the dead animal eaters in my family, I go to Food4Less. Their selection stinks. Once I found a package of whole wheat pasta, far from the pasta aisle. At first I was excited, but then I wondered, “how did this lonely, random package of whole wheat pasta get here? How long has it been here?” I do buy vegetables there in the winter when the farm stands are closed. Whole Foods produce is just too expensive.
I’m loosely loyal to my grocery store, which is a Kroger. It has a well-trained, friendly staff; it’s unionized; its prices are locally competitive; and it staffs the busy times pretty well (though I rarely shop then). Most of my beefs are with irritating other customers, rarely with the staff or store (though of course there are your typical moron cashier moments, but they don’t happen that often and managers show up quickly when called).
I could do with a slightly wider produce selection, more local produce products (though that’s hard for a chain), and more upscale deli stuff (like artisanal cheese and crap, Trader Joe stuff), but overall I’m pretty happy. The wine section is actually really good. They have an ever-expanding organic section that’s pretty good, and the organic manager frequently stops shoppers in the section to ask us what we want to see more of or if there are specific products we’d like to see — AND THEN STOCKS THEM.
(Oh, we don’t have Costco, Trader Joe’s, or Whole Foods where I am.)
I’m a big fan of our local Hy-Vee store.
They are employee owned and it really shows.
I used to be fairly loyal to Bottom Dollar grocery here in MD, but lately I have been shopping more and more at the co-op grocery store behind my house. Bottom Dollar is still good for when I need to stock up on the basics, but I can’t beat the fact that I can walk to the co-op in 2 minutes since it’s right behind my apartment.
@ghostwriter: YEA! They used to be crazy expensive when they first showed up, but they are really reasonable now.
There’s not a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s here, although there is a Fresh Market, but I don’t shop there because it’s all the way across town and too expensive.
I mainly shop at Publix, it’s close to my house, always looks clean and the prices for the most part are better than Albertson’s and Winn Dixie. There are some exceptions, Albertson’s sometimes has better deals on produce, but there’s one almost across the street from the Publix I shop at so sometimes I hit both in one trip.
I hate Winn Dixie, it’s always dirty looking, their aisles are strangely laid out and it’s expensive, I’ve seen some items a $1 more than at Publix.
I love the way stores treat customers like they are a nuisance. Shaws recently changed their price correction policy without any notice (in those states that don’t legislate a price correction policy). Used to be, they made a mistake…the first item is free. Now, all they do is correct their price. There’s a real penalty for doing a crappy job of price marking and perhaps even an incentive for leaving up old sales stickers.
@bohemian: Interesting to hear about your bad HyVee experiences – my town is also dominated by HyVee, but I’ve had very good experiences there. HyVee’s prices are a bit on the high side, but the place is always spotless, there are always tons of cashiers and baggers, and everyone is really nice. I’ve also heard that they treat full time employees pretty well and I like the fact that they go out of their way to carry and promote local and regionally produced products.
Here in San Antonio, all we’ve got is HEB, Super Targets, Walmarts, and Costcos. In other words, the only real grocery store chain is HEB.
Thankfully, most HEBs are pretty awesome. Since there’s one every few blocks, I can shop around. No customer cards, great selection of food and beer.
I’m stuck shopping at Key Food in Brooklyn. That place is absolutely awful. It’s small, dirty, has a poor selection, and rude employees. I can’t wait to move the hell away from here to some place where I can easily shop at Wegmans and Costco.
I really don’t understand why people think Whole Foods is so expensive. It’s definitely not here, with comparison to other groceries. You just have to compare apples to apples in order to make a fair comparison. For example, it’s not really fair to price compare some high-end imported tuna from Italy with the cheapest tuna you can find at a regular grocery. A lot of the stuff Whole Foods sells is higher quality/fancier food than is even available at many other groceries, so of course it’s more expensive. But they don’t usually seem to be more expensive for the exact same brands of the same items (when the other groceries stock them). Actually, I find they are often much cheaper in many of those cases, maybe because they don’t use loyalty cards and therefore don’t mark up prices so much when they aren’t on “sale”. And I track my expenses fanatically so I’m pretty confident in saying this. Whole Foods is making their money by convincing you to “upgrade” your eating habits, not by being more expensive for the same stuff.
I also like Whole Foods because unlike some other stores here I don’t get the impression they view me as the enemy. They aren’t forcing me to carry a stupid card, and they have good customer-friendly policies (for example, if they can’t get an item to ring up right, they’ll just give it to you free in a lot of cases). And of course there are plenty of things you can’t get anywhere else. I still go to a “normal” grocery too, but they look worse by comparison all the time.
@xl22k: I like my Stop & Shop. With my card (no comments!) they show my savings each time on the receipt, and I’ve saved something like $185 this year – that’s shopping for 2. The self-checkout makes me happy in the face.
I miss my Harris Teeter from down South though…even though they weren’t super cheap they had fantastic selection and clean, quiet, friendly stores I could walk to.
I would kill for a Wegamans.
But my saving grace is the Commissary on base (woo dependant ID card!) where I bought EVERYTHING for Thanksgiving, right down to salt and flour, and only spent $120. Half of that was the turkey & fry oil.
Wegmans! Best grocery store in the world. Love it.
Honestly, if you are that paranoid about loyalty cards tracking your personal information, fill them out with false information (if possible) and pay in cash.
When someone at corporate reviews your records, all they’ll see is that Mike Hunt on 169 Middlesex Lane is quite the value shopper, but they won’t know who it is.
Just don’t leave your loyalty card on your keychain especially if they guarantee a “free return to shopper if dropped in the mail…”
@xianzomby: That’s why I tend to use Shopper’s Food Warehouse. They don’t do bonus cards. But even when I don’t shop there, does anybody put real info on bonus card applications anyways?
ugh, don’t even get me started on the crappy grocery selection in Manhattan. We have a Gristedes next to us which is the WORLD’S WORST GROCERY STORE
oops, pressed submit by accident…let me keep going.
people at Gristedes are rude, their prices are INSANE, AND they have a crappy selection.
The other option is Dagastino’s which is just the better of two evils. A little cleaner, a little friendlier, but insanely over priced and not a great selection.
I would KILL for a Target, ShopRite, or a Stop and Shop in my neighborhood. I’ve always had great experiences at ShopRite and Stop and Shop. they have great prices, great sales, huge selection, and of course Target just rules.
the other option of course is Fresh Direct which is decent but not great. Prices are OK but they’re selection isn’t always great.
Bring back the days when you could talk to your butcher and ask him for a special cut. When the fish counter sold fresh local fish, not frozen stuff from asia and farm raised. The days when the bakery had stuff that tasted like it was made at home (a shelf life of a day, not all week!).
I don’t go to the market for banking, pharmacy, to get movies, etc. Invest in good fresh food!
@speedwell said “Whole Foods Market: Oh, I rarely actually push a cart there. Special ordering by the case is where it’s at, baby.”
What? What is special ordering by the case?
@oneTee: Key Food is worse. At least the Gristedes I’ve been in have been clean.
@johnva: I haven’t shopped there enough yet to really get a feel for their prices. A lot of it comes down to the fact that they sell so much organic stuff, and organic stuff is jacked up a bit anywhere you go. I just wish it wasn’t such a haul to get to one. I feel like any health and nutritional benefit I gain by shopping at Whole Foods is totally negated by then having to take that healthy food onto the NYC subways.
Oh, how I miss the grocery shopping in the D/FW Metroplex. In North Dallas we had tons of grocery stores competing for the customer. About 5 major chains, 3 alternative grocery stores, and many ethnic based stores. Safeway went out of business in our area many years back because of poor selection and prices. They only came back when they bought the Tom Thumb chain and could keep their union out. (A sad day because they went with cheap meats in the deli, stopped selling the Thanksgiving Meals, etc.)
Up in the NorthEast now all I’ve got are 3 chains, poor selection, and high prices. Bleh.
@JackHandey: For me it isn’t the paranoia/privacy that’s the big deal. It’s the hassle and the games that grocery stores that use loyalty cards tend to play with prices that bother me. Basically, many of them will continually change the price of items by putting them “on sale” with the cards, and then taking them off sale. This forces you to either shop very strategically and come back often (which I think is the goal, since so many people will buy extra stuff when they come for one thing) or to pay much more than is reasonable for something you absolutely need at that moment. Basically, it helps them disguise price increases and research how to extract even more money per trip from you. I know they could do some of these things even without the cards, but I’ve noticed that the cards tend to go hand-in-hand with places that like to constantly change prices and then put placards up everywhere claiming you’re “saving” money by using their cards. Stable prices let me better track my spending mentally. Of course, the stores probably want you to be confused about where you’re spending. I just think that they underestimate the negative effect on customer satisfaction that all these nifty marketing tricks have.
I shop at King Soopers because there is one only 4 blocks away from my apt. I’m not particularly loyal and will get some groceries if I think I need something when I’m at Target.
The only grocery store I actively dislike is Safeway. Their Lucerine brand milk turns my coffee gray, not the golden brown it’s supposed to be. Very odd.
I have complete loyalty to my grocery store, I have had nothing but fantastic service there, I almost always find what I need (there are a few things they don’t carry).
Of course, I also don’t actually care about all this mumbo jumbo about the customer cards. I’d rather care about the service I’m getting, and the cleanliness of the store. At my Harris Teeter, I get both.
i love all the coops around here..and worked at one of them for about a year or so.
i have also worked at a byerlys and, currently, am working for cub foods.
cant complain too much about byerlys. its carpeted..so the customers tend to be stuck up and bitchy…and they liked to put their children (complete with drool and cookie smeared across their mouths) on the register and look confused when i had to turn around so i didnt throw up. but otherwise…the place isnt that bad.
cub…on the other hand…(at least the one i work for) is atrocious. basically, getting a job there was a desperate attempt at making sure i had some form of income after being laid off from my previous job….
what i make at cub doesnt even pay the bills.
anyways, the floors are always nasty. and where i work, in the deli, i get yelled at for trying to sweep or clean. “people do that at night” (yeah..but its dirty *now*)
the meats, cheeses, “salads” (aka: 1 gallon of mayonase to 1 big bag of chicken) and olives…basically everything…is opened with the same boxcutter knife. which is never sterilized or cleaned.
i once found a dirty, semi rusty blade in the salami.
the customers are often a pain in the ass too. but ill give them the benefit of the doubt and just assume that cub put something in the fried chicken similar in chemical structure to nicotine.
a semi conclusion: i was treated very well at the coop, and that reflected on how i treated the customers (very effin well..)
at cub…i am underpaid for the kind of work that i do…overworked and treated like a barcoded piece of shit. and yeah…that often reflects on how i treat the customers.
such is life.
I hate the long lines and can’t understand why most grocery stores have 400 cashier lines but only 3 are open at any given time.
It’s not like cashiers are that expensive. I don’t have any hard data, but I think most cashiers get paid a kick in the head plus an expired ham at Christmas. I don’t think it would kill their operating margins to throw a few more out there so that my food doesn’t go bad while waiting to pay for it.
Grocery shopping around here sucks. I live in Fayetteville, AR which is 30-45 minutes away from Wal-Mart’s World HQ. We really only have Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club (also Wal-Mart), Wal-Mart’s Neighborhood Grocery, Harp’s, the local Ozark Natural Foods (if you CAN afford organic), and IGA. One gets the feeling that the smaller , non-Wal-Mart stores don’t want to attract the attention of Wal-Mart, less they go out of business.
The Wal-Mart mentality permeates into everything around here. Back to the point, Wal_Mart Grocery has great prices, sure, but lousy selection. To make it worse, Sam’s Club’s food selection varies on whatever they can get the best deal on.
My 3 complaints that cause me to drive farther to purchase groceries (in order of importance):
1. Quality – especially in meats and produce
2. Selection – store nearest to my house does not have a large “ethnic” / gourmet section at all
3. understaffed checkout lines – at 5:00pm, there should be more than 2 cashiers on duty to accommodate everyone getting off of work and just trying to pick up something for dinner.
I live near Wal-Mart HQ, so they dominate groceries out here. However, I’m fortunate enough that there’s a Food-4-Less nearby: it’s a warehouse-style store where you have to sack your own groceries, but the prices are lower than anybody, and they have AN ACTUAL BUTCHER. I can also buy local brands there.
To give you an idea, butter there is A DOLLAR a pound less than Wal-Mart.
There’s a semi-Asian grocery nearby (they’ve expanded to cover almost every type of foreign food) that I bring friends to when they visit from out of town. They carry things that can’t be found anywhere else, and their bulk spices are a fraction of the price of the supermarkets.
Of course grocery stores have little customer loyalty-very few people have the time, the energy of the inclination to go out of their way to grocery shop (it’s like going out of your way to get gas, in my mind, the rewards just aren’t high enough). The majority of the time I end up at the grocery store between my home and work, just because it’s easier, not because I like it.
@timmus: I’m a vegetarian and i use a lot of specialized food that I know is available but that they don’t usually stock because there isn’t a lot of demand in my area. On the West Coast, for example, they sell a wheat-protein-based “meat” called “Celebration Roast” that is so damn good the meat-eaters rob it from me every Thanksgiving and Christmas. I need six each year (a case) and all I have to do is talk to the buyer for my area’s WFMs to get some ordered in for me.
The thing I miss the most since moving to Florida is Kroger. When we lived in Georgia we only shopped at Kroger.
SuperTarget does a close approximation, but it still lacks. I hate Publix with a passion. I only shop there if I need something immediately or need to stop on the way home. Sweetbay is OK but more expensive than Publix. The rest of the grocery store chains are awful in Florida.
Kroger ROCKS, all others (except Bi-Lo) suck rocks.
I always forget something… if you special order a case quantity from Whole Foods, you get 10% off retail. YMMV but I always get it.
I don’t feel any loyalty towards my grocery store, or any other store, because they don’t feel any loyalty towards me. And I prefer it that way. I base my shopping on price, quality and convenience, not loyalty. If a store provides those things, they get my money.
I think one reason why so many people are unhappy with their grocery stores is that in many places there’s no pressure on the stores to improve them. One reason is advertising. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I was the editor of a small local paper in new york city years ago, and we we had the idea of basically doing a consumer reports style article rating the local stores. once the publisher heard the news he had a fit and threatened to fire us all, because if we ran the stpru the chains would pull their big weekly ads that helped keep the paper alive. I’m sure the same unspoken agreement occurs all across the country and no doubt contributes to the fact that the stores get a free ride when it comes to standards of service, cleanliness, etc.
I grew up in Upstate NY so I’m definitely a Wegman’s fan. I’ve lived all over and nothing really comes close as far as the big chains go. I currently live in Chicago which is home to two of the WORST grocery stores I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with: Jewel and Dominick’s. I really can’t express just how much I loathe either store, both of which I find horribly overpriced.
These days I do the bulk of my shopping at Trader Joe’s, which works out pretty well and is definitely the cheaper option. For produce and smaller trips, I stick with a neighborhood corner grocery that carries decent local, seasonal produce at reasonable prices. Even more rarely, I’ll stop into Whole Paychex for their great meat, fish, and cheese selection. Occasionally I’ll pick some things up from Jewel, but I’m usually not happy about it.
Wegman’s needs to come to Chicago. They would SLAUGHTER the competition as there wouldn’t be any.
thankfully, i live in an area that doesn’t use those loyalty cards. those are so annoying.