Thank you for participating in WholeFoods Magazine's 2024 46th Annual Retailer Survey. To show our gratitude, here is your advance look at key findings from the survey.
How to Use This Survey
If you are an independent natural products retailer, you can compare your results to stores in this survey that are most like yours by calculating your perishables as a percentage of total sales. That number will place you in one of the survey's five groups, ranging from no perishables in Group 5 to at least 59.7% of sales from perishables in Group 1. By comparing your results to peers with similar perishables sales, you will reveal the results most relevant to you and your store.
Which group are you? Find out in 3 steps:
- Tally up your sales from the four main perishable fresh-foods departments: refrigerated, frozen, produce, and prepared foods.
- Calculate what percentage of your total sales these four categories represent.
- See figure 2 for the perishable foods percent range for each group. Compare your results to stores in your corresponding Group: 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.
Figure 8As stores increase in size, so does the number of daily transactions. Large fresh-perishables stores in Group 1 saw the highest daily customer counts at 195. Customers per day trend down with each group, to 42 customers per day in Group 5’s supplement-focused stores.
Stores in Groups 2 through 5 saw about 30 customers per 1,000 square feet per day, while high-perishables stores served nearly 38 customers per 1,000 square feet per day, or 28% more compared to lower-perishables stores on average.
The overall average transaction of $42.14 is down from $47.88 in last year's survey. This decrease is consistent with what conventional grocers reported in 2023 as customers cut back purchases in response to food inflation.
Figure 11Inflation hit labor costs this year, rising to an average 20.99% of total sales compared to 17.3% in last year's survey of different stores; a gut wrenching 21.3% increase. All Groups reported higher labor costs compared to last year's survey cohort, ranging from a 4.8% increase in Group 3 to a 61% increase in Group 5. Stores in Group 2 paid the highest percentage of sales in wages, at 24.27%. Stores in Group 1 paid the highest average hourly wage, $18.97, likely due to needing more professional culinarians in their large prepared foods departments.
One retailer lamented: “Labor costs are soaring to keep good employees. Profit margins are too close to nonexistent. Employee insurance and benefit costs are skyrocketing.”
