If you’re wondering which grocery stores are the most successful in the United States, that depends on which metric you use. Walmart wins hands down if you want to look at the most sales in USD. If you want to measure success in terms of how many store locations are currently operational, the surprising victor would be Dollar General, with around 17,250 stores (as of 2021).
If you don’t live under a rock, then chances are you’ve heard of Walmart. Within the last few years, they quickly outmatched all of the previous leading grocery store and supermarket chains, now having almost double the annual income of Kroger, the former leading supermarket chain. Of the 63,328 grocery stores in the United States, 38,307 of them are supermarkets. Of those, 4,735 are Walmart locations. That means almost 7.5% of all grocery stores in the US are Walmart stores.
With the average Walmart supermarket taking up 180,000 square feet, we can deduce that around 852,300,000 square feet of US soil are taken up by Walmart. If we estimate the United States’ land mass to be 20,048,160,000 square feet, then about 4% of all US land mass would be Walmart stores.
As of 2022, the average grocery store covered a whopping 40,000 square feet, but some grocery stores trend toward the smaller side, taking up around 12,000-25,000 square feet. Ignoring outliers, like the Woodman’s in Kenosha, Wisconsin that takes up the most space of any US grocery store (252,345 square feet), we can use this average to do a few fun calculations. The margin of error will have to be fairly sizable, since we couldn’t possibly add up the exact square footage of each of the 63,328 grocery stores in the US, though.
If you take the average size of a grocery store and multiply it by the number of grocery stores estimated to be in the U.S., you end up with about 2,533,120,000 square feet (or over 2.53 billion) of grocery store!
However, that number isn’t very accurate, and we can hone it in a bit more. If we take into consideration the following:
With all of this taken into account, you get a total of 2,342,352,345 square feet. If you take the previously mentioned estimate that the total landmass of the United States is 20,048,160,000 then that would mean the 11.68% is taken up by grocery stores and supermarkets.
4. Illegal Eggs
In the US, it is a federal law that any eggs sold at grocery stores or supermarkets must be properly washed and sanitized before sale. This decreases the risk of salmonella being transmitted due to bacterial growth on the egg.
In the UK, it is illegal to sell washed eggs at grocery stores and supermarkets. Their reasoning is that if you wash them improperly, you will leave behind excess moisture, which feeds the harmful bacteria on the egg and therefore would be worse than not cleaning the egg at all.
5. Best Sellers
For the past few years, the top-selling item in stores in the United States was soda. In 2021, the top 5 selling items were soda, milk, eggs, chips, and bread. IT Retail's data is useful, but it only provides a portion of the picture. You can make sure that you are carrying the appropriate products and catering to the demands of your target market by combining this information with input from store owners and patrons. retailMetrix is a complementary solution for IT Retail and strengthens your data drive decisions.
6. Shopping time
The average United States citizen visits the store roughly 1.6 times per week. For decades the most popular day to visit the grocery store was Sunday, but in recent years Saturday has become more popular. With the average grocery store visit taking around 45 minutes, the average US citizen spends 53 hours at the grocery store annually.
This type of customer data can be very helpful when finding out how well your store is doing in the long run.
Understanding the industry and the trends within it are very powerful tools when it comes to running a successful store. IT Retail offers detailed reporting and inventory management that can help grow your business and spend more efficiently. Knowing facts like these can help give you a sense of where the industry has been and where it’s going. To navigate this fluid industry, you need a reliable POS system that can adapt to the times just as well as you can. IT Retail is that POS system. Click here to learn more about how we can help take your business up a notch.
Learn about some of the most interesting facts about the grocery industry and how some of them can affect the industry moving forward.
Schedule your free demo today to see how we can help you expand your technology and become a top competitor. Provide an email address and we will get you set up to realize why IT Retail’s POS functionality is world-class. We are customer-focused, built by grocers and we provide a complete solution.