If your household makes more than $100,000 a year, the recession has loosened its grip on your grocery shopping habits, although you’ve changed your ways since the 2007-09 economic downturn.
If your household makes less than $45,000 a year, there is no bend in your budget because any increases in gas prices, utility costs or other fees continue to eat into your food funds.
Those findings were part of Jacksonville-based Acosta Sales & Marketing’s twice-yearly “The Why? Behind The Buy” report. It analyzes consumer trends and habits.
Acosta provides sales, marketing and retail merchandising services. AMG Strategic Advisors, which compiled the report, is Acosta’s growth strategy consulting unit.
Acosta works with more than 1,000 consumer brands in the consumer packaged goods industry, including many of the highest profile products on the store shelves. Acosta has more than 22,000 employees in 65 locations in the U.S. and Canada.
AMG Strategic Advisors conducted the survey in February with a random sample of 1,098 shoppers through Acosta’s proprietary ShopperF1rst online survey.
The report’s top finding was what it called the “Tale of Two Shoppers,” the divergence of shoppers with annual incomes below $45,000 and those with incomes higher than $100,000.
However, it also found similarities among the groups. At least half of both bought more items on sale than the year before, planned their trip before visiting the store, bought “buy one, get one” offers and cut coupons.
“The U.S. consumer market continues to diverge. The over-$100,000-income householders have exited the recession, but for the rest, the impact of the recession weighs heavily on their mind and impacts their shopping behavior,” said the report.
As a result, “middle- and lower-income shoppers continue to trade down and even do without when grocery shopping, while higher-income shoppers are driving demand for premium products,” it said.
It found shoppers’ personal finances continue on a slow path of recovery and “their fear of worsening financial conditions has subsided.”
“Shopping has gone back to being a normal part of life and not the battle it felt like for so many consumers over the last couple of years,” the report said.
However, shoppers are proceeding cautiously, it found.
“They don’t foresee any major shifts in their shopping habits or their shopping budgets in 2012,” the report said. Two-thirds, or 66 percent, of shoppers expect their income to stay the same.
Consumers spent an average of $309 a month on groceries, up 11 percent, although the increase was due primarily because of price increases.
Among other findings:
• Shoppers who switched to store brands from national brands during the recession might stick with them. Three of 10 shoppers plan to stay with store brands when their budgets, while six in 10 say it will depend on the product.
• Shoppers are making fewer trips to the store. The trend began because of hectic schedules and continued during the recession. Now the trend is exacerbated by increased gas prices.
• While shoppers are making fewer shopping trips, they still visit different outlets for items, usually searching for the best value.
• Shoppers with households making more than $100,000 are driving demand for more premium products. For them, the recession ended more than two years ago. They still look for deals, but indulge in certain categories, such as bakery items.
• Half of shoppers decide what to have for dinner that same day. Shoppers are spending three times more on groceries than on eating out.
• Nearly 20 percent of shoppers use product or retail websites for coupons and information to save money. Among shoppers who use technology, 36 percent are logging on from a desktop or laptop computer from home.
• Among shoppers, 89 percent have cell phones and 33 percent have smartphones.
Acosta recommends that retailers and consumer product companies think high and low by exploring “opportunities to create premium products and extreme value products to address the growing divide in income groups.”
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