Jun 16, 2014

By: Leslie G. Sarasin, FMI President and CEO

This is the third of five posts on The World is not a Stage, It’s a Supermarket, overviewing findings from U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends 2014.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, in 1972, 79 percent of men were in the labor force, compared to 44 percent of women. Forty years later (2012), 70 percent of men were working and 58 percent of women work outside the home. This continual growth of the number of full time working women (and drop in the number of employed men) has played havoc with the division of labor and defined roles within households.

Few of us would recognize June Cleaver’s job description any more – just as few of us would recognize the monochromatic, monolithic Cleaver neighborhood any longer. Expectations about who cooks, who cleans, who shops, who pays and who drives are now negotiated settlements within every household, and always subject to being recalculated as circumstances shift. This shuffling of gender designated duties extends to the task of grocery shopping and as the division of household labor has become more complex, it has also complicated the question of who is the primary shopper –making it another part of our standard vocabulary due an upgrade.

The division of primary food shoppers by gender now shows a split of 57 percent female, 43 percent male. However, the equation is not quite that simple, especially when trying to factor in varying gender views about the level of responsibility. In a classic “he said/she said” difference of opinion, 76 percent of women felt they did most of the grocery shopping and 24 percent felt it was a 50/50 proposition, but the guys told a different story. Fifty-seven percent of them reported that they did the bulk of the grocery shopping and 43 percent said it was an equally shared responsibility.

The shuffling of gender roles and diversification of shoppers has direct implications for one of our industry’s gold standard measures. The number of trips to market per week has long been an important metric in our industry, but this needs to be reconsidered because increasing the number of shoppers in a household logically results in fewer trips for any one shopper.   

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