To think about grocery shopping is to think about the origin of a meal, the things that happen before we turn on the stove, before we chop the first onion. A meal starts with an idea, of course—a craving for the food we want to cook. But if we're to act on that idea, we have to hop into the car and get shopping.
Every move we make during that grocery shop impacts the food we later cook at home. The brand of butter, the cut of pork, the size of the eggs. If we choose fresh spinach over frozen, our meal may take longer, but maybe it will taste better—or maybe we'll get a little sand in our teeth. The decisions we make in those aisles ripple through days of meals, impacting everything from the way our hard-boiled eggs peel to how much fat our chicken thighs give off. So when we change how we shop, our cooking changes with it.
And this is a time of change ("disruption" if you'd like to be corporate about it). A year ago industry analysts predicted that we'd all be shopping online in ten years. But no—half of us are already grocery shopping online, andnow we seethat it will only take five to seven years until 70% of us are regularly doing so.
But at the same time, even those of us who shop online admit thatbrick-and-mortar stores are better. So most of us are shopping at both.
When the team here at Epicurious started thinking about the state of grocery shopping—prep for our annual month of digging into grocery shopping, which starts today—we identified four types of shopping, or shoppers, that exemplify the way people get their groceries now. The most traditional and familiar of these isthe weekly shopper, the shopper who fills up a big cart once a week at a big grocery store likeKrogerorWhole Foods.
Then there arethe Europhiles, the Americans who follow in France's footsteps and grocery shop every day, sometimes shopping at multiple stores—a cheese shop, a butcher, a bakery. The antithesis to that type of shopper isthe bulker-upper, the shopper who will drop $500 at Costco if it means they won't have to shop again for three weeks.
And finally, there are those internet shoppers, those who I callthe opt-outs, because it doesn't matter how many websites they need to hit in order to get the groceries they want—they're never stepping foot into a grocery store again.
All month, we'll dig in to these distinct approaches to getting our groceries. We'll hear from a woman whose decision to shop every day not only changed her meals, but also her relationships, her health, and her happiness. We'll hear from the opt-out shopper who shops online for his mental health, the bulker-upper who fits 24-pack sets of paper towels in a tiny studio apartment, and the Europhile who has figured out how to hit the farmers' market, the specialty butcher, and even the specialty milkman, all online. Which I suppose makes her part of the opt-out set as well. Makes sense. The truth, of course, is that there's a little bit of each shopper in all of us.
