Seasons of Retail

My research question to help me study the economic principle is “How do retail / grocery stores choose which products to display /to stock during certain seasons or in general throughout their stores?”

The article/video/etc published in SPS Commerce titled “The six shopping seasons of the consumer” demonstrates this economic principle because it shows that in order to attract a scarce number of customers, stores need to create a unique, select items that appeal to certain crowds, and to make changes to continue to attract customers. 

First, you must understand how seasons are incorporated into grocery or retail stores, as certain seasons might last longer than others. There are around six shopping seasons that retailers focus on, to help take advantage of what a customer might be interested in, need, been thinking about, ect. The first seasons that the year starts with are unsurprisingly the least active in the stores, January to February. There’s not much going on in stores at this point because most people are fatigued from buying so much from the Christmas season, where shopping is at the highest in the year’s statistics.

Second season stores focus on are March to May, where store’s are starting to pick up after the January seasons. These are the seasons where most people are cleaning out / or in general just cleaning their houses. So grocery stores are going to focus more on cleaning supplies for their customers, and thanks to Easter there’s also around a week of high sales for lamb, jelly beans, peeps, ect. And as the weather is starting to get warmer out people are going to be more keen on buying swimsuits, sunscreen, bug spray, and other warm weather accessories. Also gardens are going to start up again, so people are going to start buying seeds, shovels, and other gardening accessories.

 After it starts to warm up, sale items are around the same as the April, but picnic snack items are going to start going up in sales. And as school starts to get more and more near stores usually start to stock school related items around late June. When August hits people are starting to get off their vacations and you can expect a large surge of people buying groceries and supplies for school.

In my next blog post I will research: What factors might hurt the sales of a grocery store including branding and overall atmosphere of the store.