How Much Sales Will a High-End Grocery Store Do On a Busy Day?

December 24, 2023 4:42 PM

A local (Pacific NW) high-end grocery store did $340K in sales yesterday. This blows away old records for this store, which is in the 25,000-30,000 square foot range. Is this as crazy as it sounds? Same question, but limited to the Deli department - how much should the store deli expect to do on a record breaking day during the holidays? Are there any statistics on high sales numbers in urban grocery stores? Everything I have been able to find has to do with productivity or how much shoppers spend, but not how much the store brings in in daily revenue.
posted by happy_cat to Shopping (7 answers total)

Pickup day for reserved “holiday meals” is going to throw anomalous numbers for any Deli department, especially so in a high end store.
posted by janell at 5:14 PM on December 24, 2023

No, that's not crazy at all, in my opinion.

I have a friend in Toronto who has a 700sf store that sells specialty food items, quality sauces, condiments, etc. It's on the higher end, price-wise, but nothing outrageous. That tiny shop, which she is the sole owner of and has one employee, can do 15 to 20 thousand dollars in in-person sales on many days of December. She starts ordering Christmas inventory first week in March! For many people, Christmas is about food.
posted by dobbs at 5:50 PM on December 24, 2023

My catering daughter and I went into town on Saturday and dropped €165 in the supermarket for family holiday groceries. Driving home she speculated that the store might have turned over €1million over the day. Probably not: It took us a long time to get to the till but maybe ten minutes for the till-clerk and us to process the order. Call it €200 x 6 an hour. 10 working tills and a 10 hour day = ~€100K turnover for that busy day in one store rather than €1million. Your €340K is consonant with our guesstimate.
You can take a top down approach by dividing the annual turnover for that grocery chain (€1billion) by #stores (~200) and 360 working days to get ~€15,000 average daily turnover per store. I guess that's about right given that Christmas Eve's Eve was "busy".
On the Deli split, you're on your own: bigger ticket items than spuds and gallon jugs of milk but fewer of them. I'd pull out of the air between 5% and 10% of total turnover.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:34 PM on December 24, 2023

About two decades ago, I worked at Food Lion (a somewhat Southern r (regional chain). I was recruited to work at one of the Outer Banks (North Carolina) stores for the summer.

One of the stores averaged about $15K in weekly sales in the off-season. During the summer months, the same store averaged nearly $1 million in weekly sales.
posted by kuanes at 4:30 AM on December 25, 2023

When you talk “records” stores could be saying it’s blowing away records for “week 51” or whatever, probably not year long. Easter and thanksgiving weeks are often the highest, with Christmas right behind.
posted by bbqturtle at 4:56 AM on December 25, 2023

as a lifetime pnw grocery shopper, I would say that you can’t forget to add in alcohol sales at grocery stores in WA. wine for my whole life and hard liquor starting about 10-12 years ago (that ballot initiative put most of the state run liquor stores out of business but allowed sales of most of the popular liquor at any grocery store larger than a certain size, so all your big chains).
and uh, we do like to drink during our holidays based on the shopping carts i’ve been seeing since mid november.
and that’s even with all the liquor behind locked doors in the aisles these days. you have to press a call button and wait forever for an employee to get anything from a $7 seagrams to a $150 bottle of fancy tequila. /end grumpy old man rant

so that number of $340k sounds just like my local grocery store any day this week actually.
posted by one-half-ole at 2:41 PM on December 25, 2023

As anecdata I preordered a meal from a high end PNW grocery store and noticed that they did not take payment until pickup. I selected the store based on the meals available, not convenience of location. What this means is I spent $200 at a store that I otherwise haven’t visited in multiple years- nothing against the store, it’s just not anywhere near my home or regular driving routes. If I hadn’t already done other shopping at stores convenient to me (some people have limited time off or lots of holiday commitments and really need to limit the number of store trips they make) I would have spent a lot more, buying both normal groceries and impulse purchases because I was in a store unfamiliar to me with exciting “new” things and heck, it is the holidays after all… so I think it’s completely possible.
posted by Secretariat at 7:23 AM on December 26, 2023