How Consumers Decide Where to Shop

The average consumer doesn’t exactly have a shortage of options when it comes to essentials shopping. Between mega-retailers like Walmart and Amazon and neighborhood mom-and-pop stores, consumers make a series of sometimes highly calculated and sometimes subconscious decisions about where they’ll stock their households. 

What factors, exactly, do people consider in those decisions? We’re not wondering about big-ticket items or luxury sales people make on special occasions; we’re talking about how they choose which store to visit for the exceedingly common, replenishable goods they use in daily life. These goods are the real economy drivers, so countless brands are vying for seemingly every consumer’s attention. 

Knit set out to address the questions CPG brands and retailers alike have longed to have answers to: 

• How do consumers decide what trip to make for their regular shopping? What parts of the shopping experience drive affinity, repeat visits, and frustration (including navigation, availability, checkout, and fulfillment)? 
• To what degree do consumers plan their trips in advance, and how much of each trip is spontaneous? How do shoppers route key categories including grocery, home goods, personal care, snacks and beverages, baby, and pet? 
• How do shoppers define price and value by retailer and by category, and what do those patterns imply for how brands should position offers in different retail environments? 
• Which retailer-specific shelf, signage, package, search, and promotional signs do shoppers notice, respond to, or ignore? 

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What’s Inside This Report 

We surveyed 524 qualified grocery decision-makers across generations, income levels, and household compositions (including 59 AI-moderated qualitative video interviews) to understand how modern grocery shoppers decide which retailer to visit for a particular trip and why, how much they plan in advance, what causes in-store friction, and more. Some key findings include: 

• Despite planned routing's prevalence, 67% of shoppers made at least one unplanned purchase in their most recent trip. Shoppers aren't disciplined list-followers; they're open to discovery if something stands out.
• Walmart dominates as consumers' usual retailer choice across all 12 categories we tracked, from baking basics and dairy to ready-to-drink beverages and pet food. Fresh produce, however, is where Walmart lagged the most, with only an 18-point lead over our respondent pool’s next-choice retailer, Kroger. 
• 30% of Target’s key trips happened via buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS), making it the retailer that indexes highest on pickup. 
• Despite common myths, Gen Z isn’t abandoning big-box grocery retail. They’re even more likely than Baby Boomers and Gen X to have shopped at Walmart in the past 60 days. 

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More importantly, what does this information mean for retailers, category teams, and food and beverage brands? Download our report to dive into the following and how best to apply them to  your business strategy: 

1) Consumers don’t consider retailers interchangeable. They assign distinct roles to each major brand: Walmart is for everyday low prices, Costco is for bulk trips, Target is for more “luxury” fill-in trips, and so on. 

2) Many categories are highly planned, but immediate, legible value signals can break through the noise and drive unplanned purchases. Protein, for instance, is a major meal anchor that shoppers plan heavily beforehand, yet it’s also the category with the highest unplanned purchase rate. Why is this so? 

3) Shoppers employ a much more complex value equation in their minds than many brands realize, defining value as “worthiness” (a balance of quality, price, and convenience) rather than simply “cheap.”