Dive Brief:
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For half a century, between 1945 and 1995, supermarkets evolved by getting larger, adding more departments and broadening their product range, grocery consultant David Diamond wrote in a guest article for Progressive Grocer. Beyond that, the changes were mostly cosmetic.
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There was one remarkable technological change in the mid-1970s: The introduction of scanners. Not only did they speed up the check-out process and inventory management, they enabled supermarket operators to quickly and accurately analyze what shoppers wanted, and adjust product sections accordingly.
- Recent years have seen shoppers moving away from the one-stop shopping model, Diamond wrote, putting more and more of their business with upstart butchers and bakers joining with other artisans in small-store cooperative ventures.
Dive Insight:
For many years, most supermarkets had butchers who worked, fully visible to shoppers, behind large glass windows. Customers could press a button and a butcher would come out, talk to them, and even take custom orders.
By some time in the 1980s, many store operators moved away from store-cutting of meat because highly trained butchers are expensive, and mass cutting and packing operations cost less.
Around the same time, stores started shifting from from-scratch bakers to frozen dough and other innovations that saved both time and money. Before long, fresh bakery offerings were limited to special-occasion cakes sometimes, but not always, decorated in the store. That shift created a business opportunity for entrepreneur bakers – just as the shift away from store-butchered meat created an opportunity for old fashioned butcher shops to start popping up.
A few years ago, even as more shoppers shifted a growing share of their business to independent butchers, bakers and the like, lower-priced stores — like Aldi and Lidl — came along. Then Amazon and other concepts offering online grocery shopping disrupted the traditional store model. More recently, customers have become able to customize their online selections through the “click and collect” model, deciding online what they want, then picking up their order at the store.
In time, most industries undergo major changes. Sometimes they are evolutionary. Sometimes they are more dramatic and revolutionary. Scanners represented a revolutionary change in the food-selling world. So did online shopping, and click-and-collect. After 50 years of slow-moving change, the American food-selling scene is experiencing tectonic shifts few could have imagined more than a few years ago. Some of them are technology-driven. Shoppers are driving other ones – like the click-and-collect model and growth of single-focus stores, such as bakeries and butcher shops.