What Modern Grocery Shopping Behavior Is Costing Grocers—And How to Reverse the Charge

This article was originally published on April 29, 2021. It was updated on June 11, 2026. 

Your customers have gotten better at grocery shopping. 

That’s the most accurate way to describe what’s happened over the past five years, and it’s the framing that should inform every strategic decision regional grocers make about the digital experience you offer shoppers. 

Grocery shopping behavior has fundamentally shifted; in terms of where consumers buy, and in how deliberately they build a week’s worth of purchases across multiple banners.  

The household managers running each week’s grocery run have developed mental models of which stores to shop at based on products, pricing, and fulfillment. They’ve learned through trial and friction which apps make substitutions easy, and which make a return call a 20-minute ordeal. They know which retailer earns the large weekly order, which one fills specialty gaps, and which delivers the fresh produce they won’t trust anyone else to pick. 

They’re running this calculation continuously, mostly without even thinking about it. 

It’s no longer enough to know where a customer shops; you must understand why they shop there.

How Online Grocery Shopping Has Changed the Rules for Regional Grocers 

This overall shift is the result of online grocery shopping moving from novelty to normal. 

It’s no longer a category regional grocers can treat as secondary. It’s become the surface on which the primary customer relationship either deepens or erodes. 

What’s changed isn’t just the volume of digital orders. It’s the logic behind them. Many consumers who shop online today aren’t doing it because they prefer a specific channel. They’re doing it because online grocery makes a particular decision, on a particular day, easier than the alternative. 

The same consumer behavior that produces a Friday curbside pickup order produces a Monday delivery and a Thursday in-store trip. None of those decisions reflect a channel preference. They reflect circumstances: time available, what’s being purchased, budget in play. 

Too many grocery retailers are still building engagement strategies around channel segmentation. The problem is that consumers in each of those segments are often the same people. 

Treating them as separate audiences fragments the grocery shopping experience and signals that the grocer sees the transaction rather than the customer behind it. 

That gap matters more than ever. Brick Meets Click data shows that nearly half of monthly active users rely on multiple fulfillment methods within the same month. Every platform a shopper uses becomes an instant point of comparison. 

A competitor’s faster, easier app doesn’t just capture that transaction. It reshapes how the shopper evaluates your grocery stores on their next visit. 

Consumer Behavior: The Cross-Shopping Reality 

This cross-shopping pattern in grocery stores isn’t new. 

U.S. households have always split spend across banners: bulk items at a warehouse club, fresh produce at a neighborhood grocer, household staples somewhere in between. What’s changed is that this behavior has moved online, at a scale that has real implications for how grocers think about customer engagement. 

A meaningful share of shoppers, typically more than a third, who order from a supermarket also place orders with a mass merchandiser in the same period.  

Every banner a shopper uses becomes a point of comparison. A better experience somewhere else doesn’t just capture that transaction; it travels back and reshapes how that shopper evaluates the experience you’re providing. 

The purchasing behavior driving this pattern isn’t irrational. It reflects a functional response to a market where no single grocer reliably delivers on assortment, price, local products, and convenience simultaneously. 

Shoppers fill the gaps with whoever covers each dimension best. 

The strategic opportunity for regional grocers is identifying which gaps are driving their customers to competitors and closing them. That doesn’t mean trying to match Walmart on price. Instead, compete on the dimensions where regional stores have a genuine structural advantage. 

In-store Shopping Isn’t Declining — It’s Being Earned Differently 

For instance, in-store shopping remains a dominant channel even as online shopping increases and informs more behavior. 

More than half of grocery shoppers still use it as their primary method, citing control over fresh produce selection, confidence in what they’re buying, and the efficiency of a practiced store-familiarity routine as reasons the physical trip remains non-negotiable. 

What’s changed is how that in-store visit gets earned. It’s no longer the starting point of the customer relationship. It’s an outcome. 

When today’s consumer arrives in-store with intent and a list, it’s because the digital relationship did its work first. They’ve engaged with your app earlier that week, clipped personalized coupons at home, and seen a relevant notification on the way out the door.  

The store visit is the result, not the starting point.

Compare that to the shopper who has no digital relationship with your banner. They shop with you because one of your stores is nearby. At one time, proximity was a major competitive advantage for regional grocers, but with offers of faster, less expensive delivery coming from larger retailer, it doesn’t have the power it used to possess. 

That’s the significance of Progressive Grocer’s 2026 State of the Industry finding that 57% of shoppers now say retailer apps for personalized discounts and recommendations are the most valuable digital feature available to them. This is a 10-point increase over the prior year. 

The in-store trip follows the digital relationship, not the other way around. 

Gen Z Shoppers Are Establishing Habits That Will Define the Next Decade 

The importance of that digital relationship is only going to increase in the years to come. 

Gen Z shoppers have entered the grocery market as digital-native household managers, and their consumer behavior is worth understanding on its own terms rather than as a variation on millennial patterns. 

They’re more likely to use AI tools to find deals before shopping, more likely to cross-reference prices across multiple banners before committing to a trip, and more likely to switch grocery stores when an experience doesn’t meet expectations built by years of personalized digital interactions. 

They’ve been conditioned by Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify to expect that platforms understand their preferences before they state them. When a grocery app falls short of that standard, they don’t complain. They open a different one. 

For regional grocers, Gen Z represents both an opportunity and a pressure. 

They skew heavily toward fresh produce, organic products, ready meals, and brands that reflect their dietary preferences and values — all areas in which independent and regional grocers have historically competed well against mass retailers.

The question is whether the digital experience regional grocers offer is capable of capturing that affinity before a better-executing competitor does. Gen Z shoppers are forming grocery shopping habits right now. Those habits are durable once established, and they’re largely being established through digital touchpoints. 

What Multichannel Experiences Demand from Grocery Infrastructure 

The behavioral patterns described in this article share a common operational implication: they can’t be managed with disconnected systems. 

Multichannel experiences aren’t a feature grocers add. They’re what happens when the infrastructure underneath connects pickup orders, in-store transactions, loyalty programs, and app engagement into a unified view of how individual customers shop. 

Without that connection, grocers end up with channel metrics that look healthy in isolation while total customer value quietly erodes. Pickup orders are up, loyalty enrollment is growing, app downloads are on target, but market share is declining 2-3% annually because no system is connecting those signals into a complete picture of your actual customers. 

Customer Engagement Requires a Complete Picture 

Mercatus research shows that shoppers who engage digitally multiple times per month spend 2.6 times more than those who rarely engage.  

That advantage only materializes when the infrastructure can recognize the same customer across every touchpoint and use what it knows to make each interaction more relevant than the last. Progressive Grocer’s 2026 State of the Industry Survey found 84% of grocers now rate loyalty programs a top consumer engagement strategy, a 12-point jump from the prior year.

Loyalty, in 2026, isn’t a points-and-discounts program. It’s the foundation of a relationship that compounds when infrastructure can recognize and respond to individual shopping behavior. 

Curbside Pickup and the Advantage for Grocery Stores 

Curbside pickup holds a structural position no delivery program can replicate. Average order values have grown year over year, and repeat intent at regional grocers has improved considerably as digital infrastructure has matured.  

This all signals that customers are ready to deepen brand loyalty with their regional grocer. The experience just has to justify it. 

When pickup is executed at the level shoppers now expect — fast handoffs, reliable time slots, real-time status — it does something delivery can’t: it brings customers to your stores.  

That generates in-person touchpoints and first-party behavioral data that purely digital competitors never access. 

A shopper who picks up on Friday notices the prepared foods section, asks about a product, and associates your banner with something no mass retailer can replicate. 

When Friction Costs You Customers Silently 

It’s not enough to merely offer online grocery. It has to be done right and fulfilled properly. 

The complaints that persist in eGrocery are consistent: high fees, out-of-stock experiences, and substitutions that miss the mark. Each one introduces a quiet reason to shop elsewhere next time, and rising prices have made shoppers more deliberate than ever about where their grocery spending goes. 

A shopper who encounters friction doesn’t cancel their account or leave a negative review. They simply place their bigger basket somewhere more convenient. Meanwhile, your reporting shows stable order counts while total wallet share slowly shifts. 

Grocers operating through third-party marketplaces inherit those platforms’ limitations: their fee structures, their substitution logic, their customer communication. The only durable path to a reliable grocery shopping experience is a branded storefront backed by fulfillment infrastructure the grocer controls. 

Personalized Experiences and the Retail Media Opportunity 

The impulse to use a third-party marketplace is completely understandable. 

Regional grocers on their own can’t match Walmart’s pricing scale or Amazon’s logistics infrastructure. Meanwhile, a third-party eGrocery provider seemingly offers a convenient way to do both those things. 

But this not only sacrifices your customer data; it lends it out to competitors using the same marketplace. All of the data is collected; all of it is used to inform the entire ecosystem’s offering. Your stores and their stores. 

It also negates an incredible advantage available to grocery retailers: relevance. 

Your data shows you which shoppers prioritize organic products and fresh produce, which households have specific dietary preferences, and which customers are most likely to make more purchases when they receive the right offer at the right moment. 

Personalized experiences built on that intelligence can be used to encourage larger baskets, more repeat visits, and the kind of brand loyalty that makes a regional grocer the default choice rather than one option in a rotation.

The same first-party behavioral data and in-cart decision-making that drives personalized experiences is also something CPG brands are actively willing to pay for. 

Large retailers have monetized digital shelf space through retail media for years — sponsored product placements, targeted in-platform advertising, closed-loop attribution proving that a campaign moved product. Regional grocers have largely sat outside that market, not because the opportunity wasn’t there, but because the infrastructure to act on it wasn’t. 

When customer data, commerce platform, and brand relationship all sit in one place, the digital shelf space a grocer already owns becomes an enormous asset. It can become a revenue stream that offsets the cost of running digital commerce. 

Shopping Behavior Data Is Only Useful When It’s Connected 

The behavioral picture described throughout this article — cross-shopping, channel-switching, situational decision-making, digital engagement patterns — represents an enormous amount of data for individual customers. 

But that data only generates value when the infrastructure can read it as a unified story rather than a set of disconnected channel reports. 

When digital engagement, order history, past purchases, and fulfillment preferences flow into a unified customer profile, patterns become visible that siloed systems never surface. 

• Which customers are starting to shift their fresh produce purchases to a competitor. 
• Which households are reducing unplanned purchases in a way that suggests price sensitivity rather than disengagement. 
• Which loyalty program members are showing early signs of churn. 

None of those insights are accessible when your systems report by channel instead of by customer. 

DXPro Is the Difference-Maker for Regional Grocers 

DXPro from Mercatus is built specifically to surface those patterns and act on them. It connects every interaction a shopper has with your banner, including app engagement, pickup orders, in-store transactions, and loyalty activity. 

That unified view powers the personalized experiences, targeted promotions, and retention campaigns that keep high-value shoppers from quietly redistributing their grocery spending somewhere else. And because DXPro includes embedded customer data capabilities alongside commerce and fulfillment tools, grocers aren’t stitching together a separate personalization layer on top of an eCommerce platform.  

Intelligence and execution sit in the same system. 

Mercatus research shows that personalized offers delivered to at-risk shoppers produced a 65% return rate within two weeks, with average basket size growing 40%. Those results don’t come from sending more promotions. They come from sending the right one to the right customer at the moment the relationship is most at risk. That’s only possible when you can see the whole picture. 

See how DXPro can help you understand how your customers shop and make your stores their preferred destination. Contact Mercatus to get started.