The Trip Is No Longer One Place
The shopper who once drove to a single supermarket for the full weekly shop is now running multiple, shorter, more purposeful trips across a mix of physical and digital channels. Amazon's claim that it reached more than $150 billion in grocery sales in 2025, making it the second-largest U.S. grocer, is not just a competitive milestone for one retailer. It is a structural statement about where shopper mission architecture has arrived. A business built on Whole Foods' roughly 550 locations and an online delivery arm with no legacy store estate is now competing at scale with chains that have operated for generations.
The trip-mission split matters because each channel wins a different occasion. Physical stores still own the tactile, discovery-led, browse mission. Same-day delivery and Q-commerce own the distress purchase, the top-up, and increasingly the routine replenishment mission. Click-and-collect sits in between, serving the planned weekly shop for shoppers who want online convenience without a delivery fee or a wait. What has changed in 2026 is the speed at which shoppers are moving between those modes, sometimes within the same category across the same week.
Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy specifically highlighted that customers who use same-day perishables delivery build larger baskets than those who do not. That finding is commercially significant. Basket size has historically been the structural advantage of the planned physical shop. If same-day delivery is now replicating that basket dynamic, the replenishment mission is no longer safe territory for store-first commercial planning.
What the Numbers Are Telling You About Channel Fragmentation
The fragmentation shows up in retailer results as a tension between total sales growth and comparable-store performance. Sprouts Farmers Market reported Q1 net sales growth of 4% to $2.3 billion, but comparable-store sales fell 1.7% in the same period. The growth is coming from new store openings, not from deeper penetration of existing shoppers at existing locations. That is a trip-frequency and channel-split problem as much as it is an affordability problem, and Sprouts' management is responding on both fronts, making selective price adjustments on essentials like coffee and building out its chainwide loyalty programme, which launched in October.
The loyalty move is important. Loyalty programmes are the primary tool retailers have for observing the cross-channel shopper, connecting a physical basket to an app session to a click-and-collect order. Without that data, a retailer cannot tell whether a shopper has shifted spend to a competitor or simply moved a portion of that spend to a different channel within the same banner. For brands, the same data gap is even more costly because you do not own the loyalty infrastructure. You are dependent on retailer data partnerships to understand whether your category is losing trips or just losing the visibility of those trips.
Amazon's perishables delivery growth adds another dimension. Sales of same-day perishables have grown more than 40 times year-over-year according to Jassy's investor comments. That rate of growth, from a low base, signals that a meaningful consumer behaviour shift is in early acceleration, not maturation. Whole Foods is planning to add 100 locations, which will extend the footprint that underpins same-day delivery availability. The physical and digital legs of Amazon's grocery model are now reinforcing each other in a way that a pure-play e-commerce operation or a pure-play physical retailer cannot replicate easily.
The Measurement Gap Is the Commercial Problem You Need to Solve Now
The path-to-purchase measurement gap across omnichannel is not new, but it is getting more expensive as the number of active missions per shopper per week increases. A shopper might research a category on a brand's social page, add to a click-and-collect order through a retailer app, and then pick up that item alongside an impulse purchase in-store. Each touchpoint is recorded somewhere. Almost none of the commercial teams reading this piece have a clean, unified view of that sequence for their category.
This connects directly to the retail media challenge raised in recent analysis on this publication: brands are now directing 39% of ad spend through retail media networks but the industry still cannot reliably separate sales that retail media caused from sales that would have happened anyway. Omnichannel measurement compounds that problem. If you cannot trace which channel a shopper used to complete a trip, you cannot assign credit accurately to the touchpoint that influenced the decision. The result is that budget flows to the channel with the most confident-sounding attribution model, not the channel that actually converted the mission.
For category directors and shopper marketing leads, the practical implication is this: the retailers investing in loyalty infrastructure are the ones who will be able to show you mission-level data in the next 18 to 24 months. Sprouts' October loyalty launch, Amazon's basket-size data from same-day delivery customers, and the wider industry push toward personalised offers are all steps toward that capability. Aligning your joint business planning conversations around that data pipeline now, before the next budget cycle, puts you in a better position than waiting for the retailer to lead the conversation.
What Commercial Leaders Should Do This Week
Start with your trip-mission map, not your channel split. Most commercial planning documents describe share by channel. Fewer describe which missions your category wins, which missions it loses, and which channel carries each mission for the shopper segments that drive your category's value. Building that map, even qualitatively, changes the conversation you have with retail partners.
Second, audit your click-and-collect presence. Click-and-collect sits at the intersection of planned shopper intent and physical fulfilment. It is also the channel where search shelf placement, substitution logic, and out-of-stock handling are most likely to cost you a trip without leaving a clear signal in your sales data. If you do not have a current view of how your SKUs perform in click-and-collect search relative to competitors, you have a blind spot in the highest-intent part of the shopper journey.
Third, use the loyalty programme launches happening across the market right now as a forcing function. Retailers building new loyalty infrastructure are receptive to brand investment in exchange for richer data access. Sprouts, in its affordability and loyalty pivot, and Amazon, with its basket-size transparency on same-day delivery, are both signalling openness to that conversation. The window to negotiate the right terms is at launch, not after the programme is fully operational and the data is already being monetised elsewhere.