The Influence of Food Store Access on Grocery Shopping and Food Spending

Six percent of U.S. households are access-burdened: they do not use their own vehicle to travel to the store for groceries and live more than 0.5 mile from the nearest SNAP-authorized supermarket or superstore (SM/SS), which we use to proxy the nearest source of healthy and affordable food. Further analysis showed that: • Seventy-seven percent of access-burdened households reported a shopping event at a supermarket, superstore, large grocery store, or warehouse store during the survey week compared to 87 percent for households with sufficient access. Of those who visited these large stores during the survey week, sufficient-access households had 2.8 shopping events at such a store, while access-burdened households averaged 2.4 shopping events. • Although they average fewer trips, access-burdened households spend almost the same percentage of their weekly food expenditures at large stores as households with sufficient access—57 percent of total spending for access-burdened households and 58 percent for sufficient-access households.The per capita spending of access-burdened households at such stores is slightly lower—$28.77 on average for the survey week compared with $29.97 for households www.ers.usda.gov United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service Economic Information Bulletin Number 180 October 2017 The Influence of Foodstore Access on Grocery Shopping and Food Spending Michele Ver Ploeg Elizabeth Larimore Parke Wilde Summary with sufficient access. These findings suggest that access-burdened households overcome limited food retail options to spend similarly to sufficient-access households at large stores. Access-burdened households have a median monthly income of $1,240 compared to $4,388 for sufficientaccess households, which may account for some of the differences in spending patterns at restaurants and other types of stores.