Survey: Boomers don’t say ‘OK’ to this grocery service

Baby boomers are much less likely than younger consumers to participate in a particular omnichannel grocery activity.

According to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers from advertising platform Criteo, 48% of millennial and Gen Z respondents use online grocery delivery services, compared to 37% of Gen X respondents and only 30% of baby boomer respondents. 

Different generations of consumers also have very different reasons for browsing different grocery websites. Overall, 19% browse multiple sites for a better selection, 11% for more product information, 5% to compare shipping options, 7% for product reviews, 29% due to unavailable products, and 28% for none of these reasons.

However, 23% of Gen Z and millennials browse multiple sites for a better selection, compared to 20% of Gen X and only 10% of baby boomer/silent generation. Wanting more product information also skews young – 18% of Gen Z/millennial compared to 7% of Gen X and 6% of baby boomers/silent. Eight percent of Gen Z millennial want to compare shipping options, but only 3% of Gen X and 2% of baby boomers/silent. 

Results for browsing multiple sites to read product reviews are essentially the same across generations. But Gen X consumers are much more likely to browse multiple sites if a product they want is unavailable (37%) than Gen Z/millennial (28%) or baby boomer/silent generation consumers (22%). And more than half (51%) of baby boomer/silent generation consumers will browse multiple sites for none of these reasons, compared to 27% of Gen X and 15% of Gen Z/millennial consumers.

In another interesting finding, Criteo found that while mobile devices only account for 26% of all digital U.S. CPG sales, beauty (37%) and healthcare (31%) products significantly over-represent for mobile share of digital CPG sales.