7. The Quick-Trip Paradox: An Interview with Mike Twitty

The quick trip has become the most common unit of shopping, yet most retail stores are designed primarily for stock-up shoppers. We interviewed Mike Twitty when he served as shopper insights director of Unilever Americas in the U.S. Since then, he has opened his own company, First Light Insight (see sidebar). Throughout his career, he has conducted pioneering research on quick-trip shoppers. As he notes, although quick trips account for about two-thirds of shopping trips, shoppers buy many different types of products on these trips. This is the Quick-Trip Paradox. This means catering to the quick tripper is not as simple as defining a small set of “quick trip” products.

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Three Shoppers: Quick Trip, Fill-In, and Stock-Up

Building on the work of Wharton Professor Peter Fader, we studied data collected on 75,000 shoppers across a series of three stores to develop behavioral segmentation of shoppers. By mathematically clustering a large number of shoppers by factors such as how fast they walk, how fast they spend money, how much of the store they visit, and how long their trips are, we found that shoppers group themselves into three basic segments or clusters, as shown here.¹

Each of the segments exhibits fairly distinctive shopping behavior, as follows:

Quick: Short time, small area, slow walk, high-spending speed, very efficient.

Fill-in: Medium time, medium area, slow walk, average-spending speed, modest efficiency.

Stock-up: Long time, large area, fast walk, low-spending speed, lowest efficiency.

Very few supermarket retailers are aware that half of all shopping trips result in the purchase of five or fewer items (these numbers come from actual transaction logs from every continent except Africa and Antarctica). This ignorance is a consequence of the justified focus on the economics of the stock-up shopper, and a lack of attention to the behavior of the mass of individual shoppers in the store. This huge cohort of quick trippers is not a different breed of shoppers. They are simply stock-up shoppers on a different mission.

Any way you slice it; these quick trips are an important part of retailing. Single item purchases account for more than 16 percent of all shopping trips. Further, as noted, half of all shoppers walk out with five items or less, and the average purchase size is about 12 items. As shown in the figure, in addition to looking at the average, we also need to consider the “median,” half of the distribution, and the “mode,” the most common result.

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The quick trip is different in frequency and purpose. In our research, we found that shoppers took an average of about 10 trips per month that resulted in a food purchase. Six of these were quick trips, and only one was a major stock-up trip. Fill-in and major stock-up trips both focus on buying items for the longer term or for restocking the household or pantry. Quick trips, in contrast, are focused on buying items that will be used shortly after purchase, usually the same day or the next.

If you spend enough time watching shoppers in most retail outlets, you will notice, among other things, that few of the shoppers actually shop the whole store. In addition, if you read the research that measures actual shopping behavior, rather than what shoppers say they do, you will see mountains of data showing that most consumer packaged goods (CPG)/food shopping trips are composed of a small number of items per basket. Considering these two observations, one obvious question is “why?” This simple question has driven a whole body of research aimed at understanding shopping trips, the shopping decisions that take place outside of the store, and how they affect the behavior that takes place within.

Quick trips are a byproduct of our affluence and its effect on both U.S. households and our retail space. If we flash back in time, to some 78 years ago, the first supermarkets appeared on the U.S. landscape, and shoppers of King Cullen and Ralph’s delighted in taking advantage of two key benefits they offered: self-service and one-stop shopping. At that time, there were many fewer retail outlets, and shoppers had fewer opportunities to buy. In those days, shopping trips were infrequent, and planning before each trip was more important because running to a nearby store whenever you needed something was just not an option. Over the years, however, more and more retailers offered the items found in grocery stores and more and more retail space was built. Simultaneously, food and CPG items were also beginning to take smaller percentages of our growing incomes.

Looking over the course of time since the first grocery stores were created, we can see that as our household affluence increased and our retail options multiplied, the value of one-stop shopping declined. Today, we believe that with the great supply of retail alternatives available, when household money supplies expand or are in great supply, there is less of a need for one-stop shopping. When household money supplies contract or are in short supply, the value of one-stop shopping increases.

Although it is true that one-stop shopping and stocking-up are more economical ways to shop because they decrease the number of trips we take, our comparative affluence and easy access to retail has reduced our reliance on this practice. It follows, then, that quick trips are a convenience that has been enabled by easy, affordable access to retailers.

Another appeal of quick trips is that they enable shoppers to spend less time and effort planning. Quick trips make our lives more convenient by allowing shoppers to avoid the time and effort of planning before a shopping trip and by minimizing the need to live our lives limited by making sure that we have access to the resources available from our homes. Instead, shoppers can go more places and do more things because they can replenish their resources practically wherever they travel and whenever they choose. Regular stock-up shopping still takes place, usually on a weekly basis, and is vitally important in most households, but shoppers find themselves taking frequent, smaller trips to supplement their major stock-up trips. Although it’s true that increasing costs of shopping trips can change this pattern of shopping, for now it appears that quick trips are still the way that the majority of CPG and food items are shopped for.

As soon as a consumer decides to get something they need or want, they become a shopper, and shoppers have lots of decisions to make. Two of the more important decisions they will make are which store or stores they will choose to visit to get the items they seek and what type of trip they will make. In this context, the words “type of trip” are a kind of shorthand that describes the shopper’s objectives for a given trip and the personal resources they choose to invest in that excursion.

Shoppers pit these considerations against their knowledge of the retail landscape to determine where their investment will take place. There are a host of other important considerations that follow these three, especially when focusing on shopping behavior within the store, but these three seem to be the most important considerations that determine the type of shopping trip they take and which store(s) will be visited.

One important distinction from other shopper studies is that the trip classification in this research was done by the shoppers themselves, rather than inferring or guessing at the shopper’s motive based on the items purchased. The way it was done was very simple. After each shopping trip that included a food item, shoppers were asked to answer two basic questions about the trip:

1. How would you best describe this trip?

Major stock-up trip

Fill-in trip

Quick trip—to get a few items for a meal to be eaten within the next day or two

Quick trip—to get a few items

2. What was the main reason for the trip?

To restock the pantry or kitchen

A routine grocery shopping trip to buy items for today

A routine grocery shopping trip to buy items for the next day or two

To get an urgently needed item or two, quickly

To take advantage of a special offer

Just to get out, to look around, or have fun

To shop for a special occasion (for example, for guests, a party, or the holidays)

To get “ready-to-eat” items to eat/drink right away or before I return home

To purchase a nonfood item (but I eventually purchased a food item)

All household shopping trips that resulted in a food purchase were tracked over a two-week period, resulting in over 4,400 trips from about 900 households, across all major retail channels and most CPG/food categories. Since this first study, we have removed the limitation of looking only at trips that resulted in food purchases and now track households over the course of a year or more rather than just two weeks. Looking at all of these results has enabled insight into the basic patterns of CPG/food shopping.

Figure 7.1 When shoppers define their shopping trips as either quick trips, fill-in trips, or major stock-up trips, quick trips are the most common trip they report when buying groceries.

In recent trip management research where 11 million Nielsen-measured trips to all retail channels were monitored over the course of 2007, and all CPG trips were included, we found that 64% of the trips to purchase CPG categories were quick trips.

That such a high percentage of trips were quick trips was eye-opening, but what was absolutely shocking was that quick trips were the most common type of trip to every major retail channel—warehouse clubs and supercenters included! This finding has been confirmed every time the study has been replicated.

Figure 7.2 provides a great deal of information about the way shoppers use retail channels. You can easily see how shoppers use the different retail channels and the relationship between the size of the retailer’s box and the types of trips that shoppers take there.

Figure 7.2 Quick trips were the most common type of trip for every retail channel, even warehouse clubs and supercenters.

There are a wide variety of products that draw quick-trip shoppers to the store. This is a substantial impediment for anyone hoping to capitalize on the quick trip by dedicating retail space to serve these trips efficiently.

The Quick Trip Paradox: Although more than 60% of shopping trips are quick trips, the average consumer packaged good category is purchased on a quick trip only 38% of the time.

Table 7.1 Top Categories That Are Purchased Most Often on Quick Trips, After Removing Slow-Moving Categories

Can you spot the link between these frequently purchased categories that are most likely to be purchased on quick trips? Is it clear what ties these items together? Can one understand what would be the best assortment and layout of a “quick trip retail space” by speculating on the underlying motivations of quick-trip shopping based on this list of categories? It’s very difficult!

Table 7.2 Most Frequently Purchased Items (All Trips)

Bread, milk, produce, snacks, soft drinks . . . these familiar, high-frequency categories may provide a better basis for building a reasonably efficient “quick-trip retail space.” It would be a good idea to supplement this list with categories identified by a basket analysis against each of the most frequently purchased items. (A basket analysis identifies those items that are most often in the basket when a given item is purchased.) This analysis will identify the items most likely to be purchased, along with these high-frequency winners. Although it is focused on the most frequently purchased items rather than just those purchased on quick trips, organizing a retail space around these items seems to be a better basis for serving quick-trip shoppers—and all shoppers.

Similarly, manufacturers should not be aiming to engineer products or “solutions” to be purchased on quick trips. Instead, they should focus on creating offerings that have high purchase frequency so that they have a greater likelihood of being purchased on any trip.

2. Why do shoppers make so many quick trips? How would prevalence of quick trips differ: (a) in rural versus metro areas, and (b) at times of economic prosperity or downturn?

3. Why does Mike Twitty say that quick trips are a convenience? What do consumers “save” by doing quick trips, if those trips are less economical?

4. What purchasing state(s) discussed in Chapter 1 best describes the quick-trip shopper? How does this help retailers to better serve quick-trip shoppers?

5. What percentage of purchase decisions do shoppers make before arriving to the store? What are those decisions? What implication does this preplanning have for the concepts such as navigation, selection, affinity, and crowd social marketing discussed in previous chapters?

6. What is the Quick-Trip Paradox? What types of products do shoppers purchase most on quick trips? What does this knowledge mean for how retailers should plan their efforts to satisfy quick-trip shopper? What other analysis could be used to deal with the Quick-Trip Paradox?

7. What is the biggest difference between the broad range of “Quick Trips” that Mike Twitty describes, across all retail, and the typical “Convenience Store” trip?

8. Which is more likely to be “the store of the future,” the convenience store, or the super-center? Explain why each might be the store of the future; and also why each might not be the store of the future.

2. OgilvyAction, Shopper Decisions Made in Store, 2008.