Do your own household’s shop online once a month.

It is Sunday evening. You sign in to your own banner’s digital channels with your own loyalty account, the one that has bought the same forty items for years, and you place the household’s real order for the week, for pickup or delivery, and pay for it. Keep a sheet beside you with four counts. Steps from sign-in to the order confirmation. Codes typed, whether coupon, promotion or loyalty. Offers you clipped or saw on the shelf this week that did not apply. Items the household has bought before that you had to search for again. Do it once a month, alone, with nobody from the digital team watching. It takes as long as the shop takes. Write that down too.

The cart already knows who you are.

Kroger’s annual filing states that over 95% of its transactions run through a loyalty card, across about 63 million households. Identification at that scale is a solved problem, and your own banner has solved it too, or you could not have signed in. In this release 54% of the 200 grocers let a member redeem loyalty rewards at the online checkout. 14% apply a clipped digital coupon without the shopper typing it in, and 11% apply a promotion without a code. 70% make the known household type the coupon by hand. The codes you typed on Sunday are that gap, measured on one household. The offers that did not apply are coupons a supplier paid for, and the supplier will read the redemption rate before you do.

The weekly shop restocks the same things.

FMI and the Hartman Group’s survey of 2,023 shoppers finds that a US household makes 2.8 grocery trips a week, about 145 a year. The argument is that most of those trips replace what the household already holds, and the order you placed on Sunday was one of them. 36% of grocers let the shopper add past purchases to the cart straight from the order history. 45% show the history and make the shopper find every item again, and 20% keep no history in the cart at all. One banner has reached Leading, where the cart is proposed before the shopper asks. Saved favorites and lists reach the cart at 32%. Nobody anticipates the order. 69% offer no repeat ordering, 31% offer a fixed-interval repeat, and none proposes the replenishment for the household to approve. Your fourth count, the items re-found, is the forty searches a known household does when the cart should have started full.

What your own shop cannot show.

Two parts of the checkout will not appear on your sheet, because your household pays by card and shops online. The USDA’s Economic Research Service records that SNAP reached 41.7 million people a month in fiscal 2024, and in this release 43% of the 67 United States supermarkets take SNAP only at the register or not at all. Your sheet has no row for the household that cannot pay. In the store, 25% of grocers let the shopper scan with their own phone and pay without a lane, 44% stop at the self-checkout lane, and 32% offer neither. Among the 16 hypermarkets, the supercenters such as Walmart and Target, the scan-and-go share is 69%. Your sheet has no row for the line at five o’clock either. Keep both in view when you bring the counts to the table, so the four counts are read as one household’s checkout, with the rest of the checkout beside them.

How to read three months of counts.

Four counts, three months, one household. It is a walk-through with your attention on it, so present it that way and never as a sample. What it shows is where each cost lives. A step count that does not change from month to month is the design. A code count that changes is the promotion calendar. An offer that did not apply is a rule that exists in the loyalty system and not in the cart. Put a cost beside each. An offer missed is a supplier-funded coupon unredeemed. An item re-found is a search and a tap the household repeats every week. A code typed is a household that will, one week, stop typing. Then ask the digital team for the same four counts across every known household for the same month, in the chapter’s measures: the share of eligible online carts where the offer applied with no action, the clipped-to-redeemed rate online against in store, the share of orders that start from a prior cart or list, and minutes from open to checkout. Your sheet is how you check that the numbers they bring describe the shop you did.

By the third month you will know which step costs the most, and it is usually the one the digital team does not count, because nobody on that team shops with a coupon they clipped from the shelf on Tuesday. The chapter offers two decisions to choose between. Every offer the household has clipped applies in the online cart without a code, owned by the customer leader with the commerce leader. Or the household’s last cart is the starting point of every session, with one tap to remove what they still have, owned by the commerce leader alone. Your three sheets say which one your household would have noticed first.