Your town's favorite groceries - best selling supermarket products by major city

American Demographics, July, 1997 by Matthew Klein

The hottest-selling products in your local supermarket say a lot about your town. For example, ethnic health and beauty items sell better in Atlanta than in any of the other top-20 metros for supermarket sales, according to calculations by ACNielsen for Supermarket Business magazine. With Atlantas share of all product sales as the benchmark, ethnic health and beauty care has an index of 342, driven by the metros large, affluent black population. An index of 100 would be average.

The top sellers in other metros say more about climate than demographics. Snow shovels and other seasonal general merchandise is Atlantas weakest seller, with an index of 53. They are strongest in New York, Pittsburgh, and Boston, at 212, 190, and 173, respectively.

Local culture also affects the likelihood that an item will sell. Womens fragrances have the highest supermarket index in Chicago, Houston, and Dallas, and the lowest in Boston and other northeastern metros. Part of the poor performance in the Northeast may be due to women going scentless, but it may also be that women in this region buy their perfumes in upscale venues like New Yorks Perfumania.

Philadelphias genteel Quaker and Colonial heritage may explain why tea ranks highest there, at 214. More rough-and-tumble towns like Detroit and Cleveland have hot sales of sports and novelty cards, indexed at 177 and 159, respectively. And Denvers sales of skin care preparations, indexed at 205, conjure up a picture of wind-chapped skiers seeking relief. And sometimes the hot products are baffling. Seattles big seller, indexed at 372, is buckets, bins, and bath accessories.