COVID-19 in many key regards bears an uncanny resemblance to a bad dinner guest.
It showed up uninvited, proceeded to make itself the center of attention by dominating every possible conversation, added a million restrictions on when and where everyone else could eat and, ultimately, did not know when to leave.
In fact, COVID-19 is crashing the party so hard at this point, that it's making it impossible to even seat friends and loved ones at our holiday dinner table for fear of further accelerating the surge already in progress.
It’s almost enough to make one lose their appetite.
Almost, but not quite because as we often have to do with an unpleasant guest at the table, the world of diners quickly learned that they were going to have to adapt their dining habits for a rather dramatically changed world. Eating in a restaurant was not an option as of mid-March, and shopping in a physical store for groceries to cook for oneself was suddenly a much more daring activity than it had ever been in history.
Consumers, in short, entered spring 2020 realizing that their old, largely physical habits for feeding themselves were a bad fit in a world where proximity between themselves and strangers was frowned upon as a public health liability.
And so, as PYMNTS data showed, those consumers changed. And quickly. Between early March and April, the share of consumers dining at sit-down restaurants had declined 85.2 percent, dropping 52.3 percent in 11 days. The same early data set further indicated that traffic didn’t merely shift to take-out — only 16 percent reported they were ordering in more to replace eating out.
And that shift has persisted throughout a year where mobile and digital expansion and innovations have been a rare bit of bright spot in an otherwise incredibly challenging environment. The National Restaurant Association estimated that almost 100,000 eateries — roughly one in six restaurants nationwide — have shuttered either temporarily or permanently due to the health crisis losing $165 billion in revenue between March and July and on track to lose $240 billion by the end of this year.
The shift to digital, noted the latest edition of the PYMNTS/Kount Mobile Order-Ahead Tracker, has been one of the few factors keeping a bad situation in the restaurant industry from spinning out into a full tilt free fall. More than 46.5 million consumers around the U.S. use smartphone apps for food delivery, with this figure rising even higher when accounting for takeout or curbside pickup. Such solutions are especially popular among younger generations, with 46 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds using food ordering apps and 50 percent of Generation Z consumers saying they would try a new restaurant if curbside pickup is available.
And while the shift to digital in grocery wasn’t premised on quite the same type of necessity seen in restaurants, consumer’s pressing concerns about their safety combined with the increased convenience of digital shopping have pushed the grocery game online in heretofore unseen ways. According to the 2020 iteration of the PYMNTS/Visa How We Will Pay Survey the share of consumers who report having shopped for groceries from home online or via an app has tripled over the last 12 months.
“Thirty-eight percent of consumers who shopped for groceries during the time which our study was conducted, accounting for more than 42 million Americans, are now shopping for groceries from home — more than three times as many who did this time a year ago,” the study noted.
Moreover, the emerging prominence of digital grocery has also time-shifted consumers purchasing habits. In 2019, nearly three-quarters of U.S. consumers did their grocery shopping on Saturdays or Sundays; in a year, that has dropped to 53 percent.
That the world of food commerce is a very different place than it was even 12 months ago is undeniably apparent in the data. What isn't apparent is what happens next. And while PYMNTS has no crystal ball in service, we’ve spent a year talking to the experts about how they changed and what they think the next normal will look like. And we can offer it up to you — a veritable seven-course meal of predictions on the future of food from the people who have spent the last year building its present.
“We’ve seen a massive increase in demand for eCommerce for our business. ... If you took COVID away 100 percent and opened all the restaurants again and all that sort of thing, we don't know where [online grocery sales are] going to normalize to.”
Ahold Delhaize Chief Information Officer Ben Wishart
A Clamor Is Coming For Subscriptions
“And we see [clients] are trying to get those subscriptions built and out now. They are really looking to have them ready for the holidays. In fact, this may even end up being a gift-giving opportunity as well, so that people can buy each other subscriptions for the next year.”
Digital Innovations Will Outlast the Pandemic That Inspired Them
“Since the pandemic began, we have accelerated our digital investment. I don’t see that slowing down.”
Shake Shack Head of Digital Experiences Steph So
The Secret Sauce For Securing Foods Digital Future Is Forethought
“If they don't think about it in advance and put the controls in place, they're going to make this huge investment in their infrastructure [only] to watch it go to waste or need to be rolled back. The fraudsters will use those same features and capabilities that [QSRs] are trying to provide to their customers to commit fraud.”
Kount Chief Customer Experience Officer Rich Stuppy
Access For All Is The Future Of Digital Grocery
“I think what we are going to see is enablement of EBT cards across many more merchants, and that most if not all states are going to support this in the near term because so much of that EBT volume is going to shift to that digital channel.”
Fiserv Head of Global Digital Commerce Nandan Sheth
The Industry Will Survive Because It Must, But Will Continue To Need A Boost From Tech
“The [restaurant] industry is critical to American life. Ten percent of all of workers in the United States have some kind of tie to the restaurant industry, whether [as] a server, a cook or a manager or [as] a supplier or a servicer to the industry. We’ve got to keep these things afloat because it’s important [not only] for the American economy but [also] for the culture of our society and the microcommunities that we live in.”
ChowNow Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Eric Jaffe
