In an “omnimarket” world of pet industry competition, how do retail shopping patterns play out for pet food? Discount stores/supercenters (including Walmart) and supermarkets combined are the top channel for pet food shopping, according to MRI-Simmons Spring 2024 data, drawing 56% of category purchasers. Rounding out the top three channels for pet food purchasing are online (36%) and pet specialty stores (31%). Overall pet food shopping rates are fairly consistent across the Gen Z to Boomer generations for these top channels.
TABLE 1: Pet omnichannel shopping has truly taken hold among all generations in the U.S., according to survey responses.
Shopping patterns by generation
Looking at pet food shopping patterns by generation for individual retail and e-tail leaders:
- In the discount store/supercenter arena, shopping rates across generations are very consistent for Walmart, which draws 32% of pet food shoppers overall — edging up slightly to 34% of Gen Zers, the generation most likely to be dollar-stretching. A younger-generation skew is somewhat sharper for Target, which draws at 10%–11% of Gen Z and Millennials pet food shoppers and 9% of their Gen X and Boomer counterparts.
- With e-commerce, Chewy draws a lower share of Gen Z pet food shoppers — at 20%, compared with 23%–25% of the Millennial through Boomer generations. Amazon, drawing 15% of pet food shoppers overall, shows more consistent patterns across generations.
- In the pet specialty channel, PetSmart and especially Petco show a younger-generation customer skew. For PetSmart, which draws 18% of pet food shoppers overall, shopping rates slip slightly from 19% of Millennials to 17% of Boomers. For Petco, drawing 13% of pet food shoppers overall, shopping rates slip from 16% of Gen Z to 12% of Boomers.
With pet products, as for consumer packaged goods generally, looking at cross-channel shopping patterns is as important as looking at the shopper draw for individual retail channels or retailers. Packaged Facts’ May 2024 Survey of Pet Owners shows that 56% of pet owners describe their overall pet product shopping patterns as “all of the above” — that is, “both in-store and online, and through different stores or websites.” (See Table 2.) This figure rises to 68% among Millennials and slides down to 45% among Boomers.
TABLE 2: Pet omnichannel shopping has truly taken hold among all generations in the U.S., according to survey responses.
E-commerce vs. in-store shopping patterns
With pet products, how does this play out in a battle between e-commerce and in-store shopping? In keeping with Chewy’s pet specialty focus, cross-shopping for pet products is slightly higher between Chewy and the pet specialty channel (at nearly 8% of customers) than between mass-market Amazon and pet specialty stores (at nearly 6%).
For Millennial pet parents — both the largest generational cohort of pet owners and the most prone to “all of the above” shopping — cross-shopping between Chewy or Amazon and other retailers runs particularly high. As shown by MRI-Simmons data:
- Millennial cross-shopping for pet products is particularly high between Amazon and Target (at an index of 132, or 32% above the overall pet product shopper average), and also high between Amazon and Petco (index of 119) and Amazon and PetSmart (index of 117).
- Similarly, Millennial cross-shopping is high between Chewy and Target (index of 122, or 22% above average), Chewy and Petco (index of 118), and Chewy and PetSmart (index of 115).
With Millennial as well as Gen Z shoppers, Amazon is particularly a threat to traditionally brick-and-mortar-based retailers. Cross-shopping between Amazon and pet superstores is high among Millennials (at an index of 117 for PetSmart and an index of 119 for Petco), and even higher among Gen Z (at an index of 145 for PetSmart and an index 139 for Petco). With Boomers, in contrast, cross-shopping indexes between Amazon and these pet superstores range low, at an index of 73 (27% below average) for PetSmart and of 77 (23% below average) for Petco.
Variously armed with shopping technologies, and variously influenced by the internet and social media, “all of the above” younger-generation shoppers are deft at evading or shedding either/or choices. Therefore, generational trends keep raising the bar for keeping pet product shoppers in your corner.
This competitive reality underlies the game-changing recent history of pet industry dynamics: omnichannel, autoship/subscribe & save, border-crossings between pet products and vet/pet services, and increasingly “all of the above” market positioning and customer loyalty programs. Walmart’s October 8, 2024 announcement of “Pet Care Unleashed” — new service locations, online vet access, and prescription delivery — continues in this vein.