Stockpiling, the counterintuitive diagnosis of what’s actually going on

Chris Morley, Managing Director, Kantar Worldpanel UK & IRE, USA at Kantar

You can find out a lot by asking people questions, but big-behavioural-data is much better when trying to work out what is actually going on, especially in situations where so much is changing and everyone is looking for the most plausible conclusion (and willing to jump to one) when the images they see, strongly validate what people are saying. Global Convenience Store Focus is delighted to welcome Chris Morley as a new contributor to find out what’s really going on.

“We have all seen seen lots of video coverage in the media of people leaving a supermarket with a huge trolley full of toilet roll and numerous videos of people fighting over the last few products on the shelves and the natural conclusion is that the UK has gone mad and everyone is selfishly raiding the supermarkets to stockpile as much as they can, without concern or care for other people and families in their community”.

Kantar looked at data from representative panels of over 100,000 shoppers in the UK, which from a statistical perspective, is an unusually large sample to work with.

“The first thing was to identify stockpilers as shoppers who bought significantly more than they usually do (and knowing what they usually do with precision). They were found, but surprisingly they were nowhere near enough to explain the volume of purchasing required to wipe out the aisles of many of the categories that we were seeing empty aisles for in during the first weeks of stockpiling in the UK.

Shoppers who were buying large amounts of these products in one go, were buying much more than normal, but having isolated these shoppers based on their behaviour, Kantar calculated that they account for less than three percent (3%) of all buyers and as a result they accounted for a relatively small proportion of the problem”.

So what are we missing?

Kantar found that uplifts in sales across the whole category, often as much as 160% of normal levels, regularly each day, are being created by a much more understandable and less selfish behaviour by shoppers visiting these stores.

“Huge volumes of shoppers were adding a few extra purchases of products they normally buy plus adding a few purchases of categories that they don’t often buy into their trolley or basket and were doing this more frequently, i.e. also shopping more regularly than normal, across these first few weeks. This adds up to a whole lot of buying.

So, for categories that people buy frequently and in volume, like bread, fruit, meat, where there is a lot of inventory to go at, the shelves gradually became empty but for categories that most people don’t buy often at all, they were wiped out almost immediately.

This can still be described as stockpiling and the result is many households’ cupboards, fridges and freezers filling up with products, but it is not the kind of behaviour that those shoppers would see as selfish and abnormal, in the same way that walking out of a store with the last 30 packs of loo roll obviously does.

It also explains why retailers’ restrictions on certain categories to several purchases per shopper and the government’s pleas to not buy more than you need, have not worked very well so far. Because for most people, they are not buying like the crazy person they saw on TV, or buying significantly more than they need, because the majority feel that they need to buy a reasonable amount more and the vast majority have not been filling their spare rooms with pasta.

The problem has, according to the retail industry experts, been exacerbated by delays on replenishment of stores, rather than an absence of products in the supply chain and hence there is a good chance that if the small percentage of crazy buyers does not increase and the majority of shoppers who have been stocking up, go back towards a replenishment of their higher stocks, we should see the problem gradually subside in the coming days and weeks”.

(1) Contact Chris via LinkedIn if you would like to hear more about how Kantar collect and manage their big-data and go to great pains to measure the UK retail marketplace with accuracy, whilst protecting the privacy and identity of the individuals and households who take part.

A special thank you to Andrew Walker from the Kantar team (andrew.walker@kantar.com) who did the majority of the analysis on this topic over the last couple of weeks and was responsible for finding the (counterintuitive) diagnosis of what’s actually going on.