We document a number of striking features about the initial impact of the pandemic on local commerce across 16 US cities. There are two novel contributions from this analysis: exploration of neighborhood-level effects and shifts between offline and online purchasing channels. In our analysis we use approximately 450 million credit card transactions per month from a rolling sample of 11 million anonymized customers between October 2019 and March 2020. Across the 16 cities we profile, consumers decreased spend on the set of goods and services we define as "local commerce" by 12.8% between March 2019 and March 2020. Growth in all 16 cities was negative. Consumers shifted a substantial share of local commerce spend online, such that year-over-year growth in online spend was small, but positive, at 1.5%. With respect to grocery and pharmacy purchases, online spend grew at least three times as fast as offline spend. Overall spend declines were uniform across neighborhoods of differing median household income, though lower-income neighborhoods experienced the highest proportion of extreme negative declines. We also find evidence that many low-income neighborhoods are increasing spend on online grocery slower than others, but increasing their use of online restaurants the fastest. Consumers in low-income neighborhoods also tend to live farther from the grocery stores at which they shop. Compared to their counterparts in higher-income neighborhoods, consumers in low-income neighborhoods have not been more likely to shop at grocery stores closer to where they live since the onset of the pandemic. * We thank James Duguid and Bryan Kim for their substantial contributions to the production and analysis of the research presented here. We also thank colleagues at the JPMorgan Chase Institute for their comments and suggestions. This research was made possible by a data-use agreement between Lindsay E. Relihan and the JPMorgan Chase Institute (JPMCI), which has created de-identified data assets that are selectively available to be used for academic research. All statistics from JPMCI data reflect observations based on at least 100 customer accounts with medians reported with small errors to protect privacy where appropriate. The opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not represent the views of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Contact info for Lindsay E.

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The Local Consumer Commerce Index is a measure of local economic activity parsed by a variety of consumer and merchant characteristics. By leveraging an administrative database of over 24 billion debit and credit card transactions made by over 64 million de-identified customers, this index from the JPMorgan Chase Institute addresses the lack of data series with sufficient spatiotemporal and demo/firmographic resolution to support tactical decision making in local economies.Each transaction carries the age and income of the consumer, the merchant size and type of product it sells, as well as the zip code of both. Using these characteristics we construct a measure of year-over-year spending growth by consumers at merchants located in 14 major metropolitan areas in the US. The index data are screened and weighted to represent population-wide spending levels. This unique lens on local economies is freely provided to the public in accordance with the Institute's mission of advancing the public good.We have also extended this data asset beyond its use for reporting and economic monitoring. One extension has been our research that measures intra-city demand. By measuring the distance between where consumers live and the merchants at which they shop, we have lent nuance and granularity to policy discussions surrounding intra-city inequities in economic vitality.