Impact of COVID-19 on online grocery shopping discussion and behavior reflected from Google Trends and geotagged tweets.

People express opinions, make connections, and disseminate information on social media platforms. We considered grocery-related tweets as a proxy for grocery shopping behaviors or intentions. We collected data from January 2019 to January 2022, representing three typical times of the normal period before the COVID-19 pandemic, the outbreak period, and the widespread period. We obtained grocery-related geotagged tweets using a search term index based on the top 10 grocery chains in the US and compiled Google Trends online grocery shopping data. We performed a topic modeling analysis using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and verified that most of the collected tweets were related to grocery-shopping demands or experiences. Temporal and geographical analyses were applied to investigate when and where people talked more about groceries, and how COVID-19 affected them. The results show that the pandemic has been gradually changing people's daily shopping concerns and behaviors, which have become more spread throughout the week since the pandemic began. Under the causal impact of COVID-19, people first experienced panic buying groceries followed by pandemic fatigue a year later. The normalized tweet counts show a decrease of 40% since the pandemic began, and the negative causal effect can be considered statistically significant (