Stop Chasing Loyalty. It's Already Dead.
Only 1% of grocery shoppers are loyal to a single store. Here's what mid-tier grocers should do instead of panicking.
Caught a sharp piece in Grocery Dive by Victor Kimble: only 1% of grocery shoppers are now loyal to a single store. He calls it the rise of the “promiscuous shopper,” and his take on category dominance is the sharpest read on where grocery is headed. 🛒
But let’s push one step further, for the mid-tier grocers reading this and panicking.
“Just pick a category and dominate” sounds great on a slide and terrifying on a P&L when you’re a regional chain competing against Walmart, Amazon, and Costco.
Here’s a slightly different path for mid-tier grocers:
🍎 Dominate a geography before you dominate a category. National chains win categories. Regional chains win neighborhoods. Look at:
Heinen’s. 23 stores in Ohio and Illinois. Family-owned since 1929. Legendary staff tenure, heavy local sourcing. They own Cleveland and Chicago suburbs in a way Kroger can’t touch.
New Seasons Market. 20 stores in the Pacific Northwest. B Corp certified. Local farmers on the signage. Community identity is baked into every aisle. A decade in, Amazon still hasn’t figured out how to compete with them on their own turf.
That’s the moat. Not scale. Not price. Belonging.
🏪 Be the “anchor trip,” not the treasure hunt. You probably can’t out-quirk Trader Joe’s. Don’t try. Own the reliable weekly trip instead.
Market Basket in New England is the masterclass. When the board fired its CEO in 2014, shoppers boycotted, suppliers stopped delivering, and the board caved in six weeks. That’s not treasure hunt energy. That’s “you don’t mess with my store” energy.
Boring, done with real care, beats clever.
🤝 Pick one category to invest in like your life depends on it, because it does. Kimble’s right that you can’t be adequate at everything. But for mid-tier operators, the move isn’t spreading investment thin across three “must-wins.” It’s picking ONE.
Stew Leonard’s has eight tri-state stores built entirely around dairy and fresh. They became “the Disneyland of dairy stores.” One category, obsessed over, became a regional institution.
Berkeley Bowl has two stores. TWO. Shoppers drive 30 miles for a produce selection so ridiculously deep that Whole Foods and Amazon have opened nearby and still can’t touch them. (Full disclosure: I’m biased for any place with 28 types of mushrooms.)
Pick one. Fund it like a startup inside your company. Kill the corners that don’t matter.
The promiscuous shopper isn’t your enemy. They’re already rotating through four or five stores a week. Are you one of them, or the one getting cut this quarter?
Mid-tier grocers don’t need to beat Costco. They need to be undroppable.
Question for the community: If you run or advise a regional grocer, what’s the ONE category you could own that the nationals can’t touch?