Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Grocery Sales And The Pandemic, Joy A. Salentine

Honors Capstones

The focus of this paper is to examine the impact of COVID-19 on grocery sales in the United States. My hypothesis is that periods with higher COVID-19 severity, measured through the number of COVID-19 deaths, will show higher grocery sales, all things equal, due to the increased demand during the unusual circumstances of the pandemic. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S Department of Agriculture, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, I perform a regression analysis to test my hypothesis. The results confirm my hypothesis by showing that there is a positive and significant effect …