Competition and Markets Authority
Ethnographic research on consumers’ use of unit pricing when shopping for groceries in-store and online
Challenge
Ensuring that shoppers can make informed choices about the value of the grocery products they buy is vital given the cost-of-living crisis and inflationary pressures on food and other essentials. Unit pricing is a labelling system for displaying the cost of different products by reference to standard units of weight or volume. It enables shoppers to compare the relative costs of different products regardless of their packaged size and helps them get the best deal when comparing products.
In January 2023, the CMA launched a review considering the use of unit pricing both in-store and online in the groceries sector. The review follows the Which? 2015 Groceries Super-complaint where the CMA considered pricing and promotional practices in the groceries market. The CMA’s response to the Super-complaint identified three areas where there were believed to be problems with unit pricing in supermarkets. These were: legibility, inconsistency, and missing information on special offers. This research focused on shopper awareness, understanding and use of unit pricing. The overall research objective was to better understand how UK shoppers make use of the unit pricing information available to them when shopping for products.
Approach
Our approach brought together ideas from behavioural economics, ethnography, and shopper research. We engaged 50 members of the public in a three-stage process to observe their grocery shopping behaviours and understand the factors affecting the use of unit pricing. The sample was split to include 25 participants who undertook their grocery shopping online versus 25 who shopped in-store.
The three stages involved a pre-meet call to gather context around their shopping habits, followed by an ethnographic observation of their shopping trip, and a follow up 60 minute in depth interview to understand the extent to which unit pricing informed their decision making.
Impact
We delivered our findings to a wide group of civils servants at the CMA, which was later published in a report that made up part of a programme of consumer research to better understand how and when UK shoppers make use of unit pricing information when shopping for grocery products. This report has now gone on to inform the development of a guide to using unit pricing and other public communications aimed at raising awareness around the value of unit pricing for UK consumers.
You can read our final report in full here
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