The new normal: Grocery shopping behavior changes before and after the COVID-19 vaccine

Abstract

In this paper, we use transaction data from a large grocery store retailer to describe changes in grocery shopping behavior associated with the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic before and after the vaccines were developed. We find that in general, households increased their spending and decreased their number of transactions early in the pandemic. Further, most households increased their reliance on online shopping during the pandemic and this shift persisted into the post-vaccine period. We find somewhat mixed results on how overall healthfulness of grocery store purchases changed during the pandemic, and we find that changes in healthfulness vary with market and household demographics. Perhaps most interestingly, we find that changes in a store's spending and transactions, along with the healthfulness of these purchases, vary significantly with the racial composition of a store's market and that these differential changes persisted after vaccines were available.