Grocery dwell math and what it asks of a charger

Revio 360 · October 2026

A hotel has one dwell time: overnight. A restaurant has two: drive-thru and dine-in. A grocery parcel has three or four, and they do not average into something useful. The shopper grabbing a rotisserie chicken and a loaf of bread is in and out before most dashboards finish loading a session. The shopper doing the week's shopping for a family of five is parked long enough to fully use a Level 2 port. Both park in the same lot, often within the same hour, and a charging program built around their blended average serves neither one well.

The grocery trip is actually several trips

Call the fill-in trip what it is, a handful of items, a round trip measured in single-digit minutes, happening at a volume most other destination formats never see because people pass a grocery store several times a week, not once. Layered on top of it is the routine weekly shop, a full basket, a longer walk through more aisles, parked for roughly the length of a Level 2-friendly window. Above that sits the stock-up or big-basket trip, a cart that needs loading into the trunk in stages, routinely the longest dwell in the lot. Curbside and online-order pickup adds a fourth pattern that barely touches the store at all, a car idling near the entrance while an associate brings the order out.

None of those four is the "real" grocery dwell time. All four are, at different volumes depending on the day of week and the hour. A charging program sized to one of them while ignoring the other three is sized to a trip that is not actually representative of who is parking there.

Why Level 2 fits most of the distribution, and where it doesn't

This is the one place destination charging's usual answer, Level 2, actually matches the bulk of the trip-time distribution rather than just the median. A routine weekly shop sits comfortably inside a Level 2 session long enough to add real range, which is the dwell window destination charging at 7.6 to 19.2 kW was built around in the first place. A stock-up trip runs long enough that the higher end of that power band, or a modest DC "top-up" tier where the service supports it, puts more energy back in the battery than a standard port would over the same window.

The fill-in trip is the one no charger speed solves, and that is fine. A five-minute stop is not a charging opportunity at any power level; it is a parking spot that happens to be near the entrance, and pretending otherwise by chasing a faster port for that segment of traffic wastes capital on throughput nobody there is positioned to use. Pickup bays are the same case by a different mechanism: the car is present but the errand has nothing to do with charging, and trying to retrofit that zone into the charging program usually just adds complexity without adding sessions.

Stall placement follows the basket, not the door

Where stalls sit in the lot matters more at a grocery parcel than at most other destination formats, because the two shoppers who would most benefit from charging, the weekly shop and the stock-up trip, are also the ones least likely to fight for the closest spot to the entrance. A fill-in shopper takes whatever space is nearest regardless of what is installed there. A stock-up shopper pushing a loaded cart is already walking a known distance to the car and a known distance back with the cart, which makes a charging zone positioned a short, cart-corral-adjacent walk from the entrance, rather than directly against the doors, a better match for the dwell the program is actually trying to serve.

Size the stall count to the week, not the day

Grocery traffic does not peak the way a restaurant's lunch rush or a big-box's weekend rush does. It builds across the week and concentrates on the days people actually do the big shop, which skews toward evenings and weekends in a shape distinct from either format. A stall count set against an average daily visit number will look adequate on a Tuesday afternoon and queue on a Thursday evening, for the same reason a restaurant sized to average traffic misses its own dinner rush: the average day was never the day the capacity needed to clear.

None of this requires exotic modelling, it requires treating the grocery dwell distribution as four overlapping patterns instead of one number, and sizing charger speed, stall count and placement against the patterns that can actually use the equipment. Done that way, a grocery site's charging program earns on the trips that were always going to carry it, without wasting capacity on the ones that never could.