Google News
spot_img

New Habits Die Hard

Must Read
Another year has come to a close, like clockwork, and predictions abound in the trade and general media. But this time, things are so radically different from the recent past that I want us instead to think hard about what the down economy means to us as food retailers, and what we can do about it in 2009.
First and foremost, it seems clear that the current economic situation is the most challenging we’ve seen in a long time. It’s affecting all of us – not just rich investment bankers, or poor homeless people, but everyone in between as well.
As a citizen of New York City, I see this broad impact every day. It’s easier to get a cab, a relative breeze to get a table at the hot new restaurant, and no problem to snag a ticket to the latest Broadway hit. But despite these opportunities, I find myself taking the subway home, warming up canned soup, and watching a DVD on my TV for entertainment. I know I’m not alone in making these choices. In other words, not only have the economics changed, but attitudes have changed as well. Almost all of us are at least a little bit poorer at the moment, but more to the point, all of us feel a lot poorer, we’re behaving accordingly, and that shift will last for a long time.
So what does this mean for food retailers? We’ll feel the effects of the economic meltdown in our stores in at least these primary ways:
• Traffic counts will increase, rather than decrease. 
More people will be eating at home, more people will have more time on their hands, and more people will be looking to stretch their time, rather than compress it. That means more people in your stores, spending more time (if not more money) and more effort on their shopping.
• There will be more focus on pricing, and on opportunities to save money. 
As a result, the consumer pendulum will swing from being willing to pay more for some gain, such as convenience, to being willing to sacrifice something to save money. And that sacrifice could be of time, effort, or other variables. Consumers will want to save money, they’ll need to save money, and they’ll be willing to work to save that money.
• Interest will grow in learning how to cook, and in general how to work with food. 
Over the past 15 years, USA as a country has managed to raise a generation of consumers who have no idea how to cook. The confluence of virtually all women joining the work force, the rise of fast-food and casual dining, and the development of many convenience food options had made the basics of cooking something nice to know, but not a necessity. But another trio of forces is at play now: Budgets are getting tighter, folks are staying in, and they feel the need to move from highpriced prepared foods to lower-cost ingredients. This will drive consumers to learn how to cook, and I don’t mean that they’ll learn how to cook beef Wellington; I mean they’ll learn basics such as how to roast a chicken.
This will lay the groundwork for long-term changes in habits. Once consumers begin to take a few extra steps to save money, for example by cooking a chicken in the oven rather than buying a rotisserie chicken and popping it into the microwave, these steps will quickly become habits.

Some of these habits will last a lifetime, and that ought to fundamentally change the direction of our stores. If only 50 percent of the consumers who are being forced by economic hardship to learn how to cook decide that they actually enjoy cooking, this will significantly change the future direction of our stores.

Latest News

Smartsters opens shop-in-shop store at Crossword in Pune

Currently, the company plans to open over 10 shop-in-shop locations pan India Bengaluru: Kids’ furniture brand Smartsters has launched its...