The average office worker spends about $1,900 a year on lunches, day time and after-work shopping and dinners and drinks, according to a survey conducted last year among suburban and downtown office workers.

The survey by New York-based International Council of Shopping Centers covered 2,400 workers in eight metropolitan markets across the U.S. ICSC serves as the trade association of the shopping center industry. John Chapman, the council’s director of research, presented the survey in Minneapolis to a group of Twin City retailers and retail developers.

“With the continued interest in downtown retail development and mixed use projects and with the evolution of suburban ‘downtowns’ with regional malls at their core, office workers are an increasingly important source of retail spending,” says Chapman. “In the past, there has been some fragmentary research on their spending behavior in specific markets but no systematic benchmarks on things such as how much they spend, on what and why.”

The council hopes that the survey’s findings will prove useful in evaluating the feasibility of retail projects in which office workers playa role, and in developing marketing programs to attract the office worker customer.

Downtown and suburban areas

The survey included both downtown and suburban areas. On the assumption that spending behavior is influenced by the availability of retail facilities, both downtown and suburban markets were classified by retail service level: those with ample retail facilities and those with limited retail facilities. Examples of cities with ample retail facilities are Boston, Chicago and San Francisco; cities with limited shopping are Atlanta, Tampa and Dallas.

Downtowns were classified on the basis of data from the 1982 Census of Retail Trade. In suburban areas, offices within two miles of a major regional mall were considered to have ample retail facilities.

Telephone interviews

Conducted by telephone in November, 1987, with office workers at their place of work, the interviews sought detailed information on their lunchtime activities, spending patterns, and shopping habits during the work day and after work. The eight metropolitan areas in which interviews were conducted are among the 30 largest in the U.S. and were selected to provide broad geographic diversity. In each metropolitan area selected, the local office of a national real estate consulting firm drew upon its knowledge of the local market to identify specific office sub-markets reflecting a broad range of settings. In total, nine downtowns and 16 suburban office areas with at least one million square feet of office space were selected for the interviewing.

Once telephone contact with a business was made, the interviewer asked to speak with someone at a specified occupational level. Respondents were screened to ensure that they were employed full-time (at least 35 hours/week) in the designated subarea, worked in an office facility and worked during the previous week.

To ensure a representation of office workers from different occupational levels, quotas were established to recruit approximately one-third of the respondents from each of the following categories: top/mid-management; junior management, and secretarial/clerical.

The interview itself sought detailed information on usual behavior and specific activities in the previous week: the time at lunch, sources of meals and spending; shopping during the work day, items purchased and amounts spent; commuting patterns, shopping and other activities after work.

General findings

On average, office workers in downtowns with ample retail facilities spend $2,085 a year, about one-third more than their counterparts in downtowns with limited retail facilities. The differences are evident in every major category but are particularly pronounced in spending after work. The amounts are relatively small but office workers in strong retailing downtowns spend about twice as much after work on dinner, drinks and shopping as those in downtowns with limited retail facilities. In suburban areas near major regional malls, office workers spend an average of $2,055 per year, about 15% more than their suburban counterparts with limited retail facilities. The differences are most pronounced in work day retail spending and in dinner or drinks after work.

Overall, food accounts for roughly half of total office worker expenditures: lunches, snack purchases during the work day, and dinner or drinks after work. Such food items account for 48% of total spending in suburban areas near major regional malls and range up to 59% of the total in downtowns with limited retail facilities.

Lunchtime behavior

While there are many differences between downtown and suburban workers in the various retail settings, there are also several important common denominations in lunchtime behavior. Lunchtime activity is concentrated within a relatively short time span: 70% of all office workers leave for lunch sometime between noon and 1:30 p.m. They are away from their desks an average of 51 minutes. Almost half (49%) take a full hour for lunch and just under 40% take less time. On average, downtown workers take somewhat longer lunch hours than their suburban counterparts (a mean of 54 minutes compared to a mean of 48 minutes).

Three-fourths of the office workers reach their lunch destination in less than 10 minutes. Eighty percent of the downtown workers usually walk to lunch and 85% of the suburban workers usually drive.

Bringing lunch from home is the single most important source of lunchtime meals: 31% of the lunches eaten in the previous week were brought from home. The majority of respondents never brought their lunch from home but 45% did so at least once and just over 10% brought it every day.

Other sources of lunch during the week were sit-down restaurants (22%), carry-outs (15%), fast food restaurants (15%) and company cafeterias (6%). On any given day, 7% of the office workers didn’t eat lunch.

During the work week covered in the interviews, office workers ate the majority of their lunches in the building where they work. One-fourth ate in the building every day. Reflecting winter behavior, these patterns may be different in warmer weather.

Work day shopping

Overall, 38% of the office workers reported shopping during the work day. The patterns, however, differed greatly between downtown and suburban locations, and between areas with ample retail facilities and those with more limited shopping opportunities.

In downtowns with ample shopping facilities—Boston, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and Seattle—45% of the office workers shopped during the work day. In downtowns with more limited shopping opportunities—Atlanta, Tampa, Dallas and Oakland—on the other hand, only 35% of the respondents shopped during the work day.

In suburban areas, the availability of retail facilities also had an effect: 38% of the suburban office workers near a major regional mall shopped during the work day compared to 32% of the workers with more limited retail facilities nearby. While the proportion of office workers shopping during the work day varied by area, the average number of shopping trips did not differ very much, approximately 2.5 times during the week.

In one of the big surprises of the study, only 60% of the work day shopping trips occurred during the lunch hour; 40% occurred at other times during the work day.

There are several possible explanations for this. Men, and those of both sexes in upper management positions, frequently have the flexibility to go shopping during normal work hours.

In the survey, in fact, the incidence of non-lunch shopping trips was higher among these groups than it was among women as a whole and those in the lower rungs of the management structure.
Then, too, some office workers may eat lunch quickly at their desks and go out to shop at other times during the work day. In any event, the high proportion of non-lunch shopping trips reported in the survey contradicts the conventional wisdom that office worker retail spending is confined to the lunch hour.

Apparel and accessories

Apparel and accessories were the items most frequently purchased during the work day shopping excursions. Nearly 20% of the downtown workers and just under 15% of the suburban workers reported purchases in these merchandise lines. Roughly 10% of the respondents in both types of areas reported buying other shoppers goods (or department store-type merchandise), and 10% bought incidental items such as books, magazines, greeting cards and drug store items. Suburban workers bought groceries and other food stuffs during the work day more often than their downtown counterparts.

Activities after work

Office workers do a wide variety of things after work before they go home. During the week surveyed, 53% bought groceries; 30% had gone shopping for other things; 29% stopped for dinner or drinks; and 30% stopped for other activities such as a visit to a health club, an exercise class, movie or educational program. Only one-fourth of the respondents went directly home every night after work.

While office workers do a lot of things after work, the majority do them at locations closer to home. Only 12% of the respondents stopped for dinner or drinks at places close to the office and a smaller proportion went shopping near their place of work. In both downtowns and suburban areas with ample retail facilities, however, these proportions were higher than they were in areas with more limited retail facilities.

ISCS commissioned Floam Research Associates to direct the survey and data tabulations.  Sampling lists were provided by American Business Lists, Inc., and the interviewing was conducted by AHF Marketing Research, Inc.