The supermarket is a marvel of mass-merchandising, technology, and distribution — consider that most supermarkets must be continuously stocked, be opened around the clock, and manage an inventory of almost 40,000 different products every single day. And that doesn’t even include the annoyance of dealing with coupon divas that create long lines at the checkout counter.
Over the decades, the supermarket industry has carefully tracked the buying habits of its customers. With the introduction of “club cards” the supermarket has taken the role of Big Brother: it knows exactly who you are, where you live, what you buy, and — perhaps most troubling of all — what you actually eat (as opposed what you tell your doctor during your annual physical). Thanks to the data published by the Food Marketing Industry, we can peek under the roof of the average American supermarket (all data is from 2010-12):
Total supermarket sales: $602.6 billion
Median total size: 46,000 square feet
Average number of items carried in a supermarket: 38,718
Time to read the label of every product: 484 hours
Average number of trips a consumer makes: 2.2
Percentage of grocery purchases that are bought on impulse: 20%
Length of time it takes a consumer to make a decision to buy an item: 15 seconds or less
Percentage of disposable income that consumers spend on food: 5.7%
Most common foods purchased: milk, coffee, soda, bread, chips, eggs, flour, vegetables, fruit, cheese
Read related post: The Three Second Rule
The Weight of World’s Population
Dieting by the Numbers
For further reading: fmi.org/research-resources/supermarket-facts
shareranks.com/15836,Most-Common-Foods-Purchased-at-a-Grocery-Store#b
blogcritics.org/gotta-have-it-impulse-marketing-part/
onecentatatime.com/how-rampant-is-impulse-buying-infographics/
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