Three months since grocery retailing experienced two of the biggest sales weeks at the onset of coronavirus in the U.S., many consumers are growing fatigued with their quarantine cuisine and bored with tried-and-true recipes. Restaurants have reopened, albeit with social distancing measures in place, and reservations and transactions are steadily gaining back lost ground. Grocery shopping patterns continued to evolve the second week of June. In most areas, stores had better in-stock position for fresh meat, resolving purchase limitations for some if not all meats. Prices remained elevated, which resulted in high dollar gains of 15.9% — the 15th week of double-digit gains since the onset of the pandemic — despite of going up against the Father’s Day 2019 sales bump that fell one week earlier than in 2020.
Volume demand also remained above last year’s levels, albeit by just 0.9%, its lowest gain since the first week of March. Shoppers may be dipping into the meat supply they had built up in their freezers and are also highly engaged with seafood, frozen meat and frozen seafood sales, that have all been highly elevated for weeks.