36|Retail News|June 2020|www.retailnews.ie
Covid-19 Pandemic
Are you ready for the ‘new normal’?
Artem Bielozorov, PhD student at the School of Business at Maynooth University, identifies five practices that he believes will become the new normal in the retail grocery sector. MANY grocery retailers have experienced severe challenges in recent months, coping with a surge of traffic at both physical and online stores as customers stockpiled and panic bought at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis. Scaling up operations quickly to serve that demand proved particularly difficult for some. The potential threat of transmitting or contracting the virus at each interaction with other people has transformed the customer journey in physical stores. Retailers of all types, but grocery stores in particular, must be prepared to act quickly to respond to these changes, while also learning from the experience of their counterparts in other countries. Even if retail managers have come up with plans to overcome short-term disruptions, they need to begin medium- and long-term planning to help their business recover and adapt to the new, post-Covid-19 retail landscape. Here are five practices which will heavily impact the grocery retail sector after the Covid-19 pandemic has passed. 1. E-grocery shopping will grow Online grocery shopping adoption has been relatively slow worldwide, but the current coronavirus pandemic will
accelerate this dramatically. According to a recent survey by CivicScience in the US, 47% of customers said they were shopping for online groceries during the week of March 22, 2020, compared to 11% just three weeks before. A separate survey in the United States found 41% of those who ordered food online during the previous week were first-time online grocery customers (Source: Source: Gordon Haskett Research Advisors Survey, March 13, 2020). Among the major challenges with e-grocery for customers is getting used to selecting and ordering a large number of various items, which many previously found to be too much of an effort, sticking to traditional in-store shopping. The forced quarantine, however, has significantly accelerated that process and the convenience inherent in ordering online for either home delivery may be too much for some consumers to ignore after the pandemic is over. 2. BOPIS (buy online pick up in-store) / Click & Collect Conventional definitions of “store” have begun to change. The current crisis has demonstrated that the most important job retailers do is simply helping the customers acquire products without them having to step foot inside the premises. Similar to e-grocery, buy online pick-up in-store (BOPIS) has seen a sharp increase. In the US, Kroger announced its first pickup-only store for click-and-collect orders, Starbucks announced plans to make all of its stores to-go only for the foreseeable future, and Walgreens announced that it too would convert its 7,300 pharmacy drive-thru windows for grocery pick-up. For retailers, this comes with both pros and cons. In-store foot traffic drives planned and impulse purchases and helps
