On foot, in the shopping cart or in the buggy: the influence of children on supermarket shopping

Abstract

The paper goal is to analyze how the shopping cart strategy can influence the family’s buying process when they are with children in supermarket. The literature review addresses both the evolution of supermarket retailing and children's influence on family’s decision-making at supermarket. We conduct two researches, first (qualitative) included 12 observations and 7 interviews at one supermarket store, second (quantitative) consisted of a survey at four stores of same supermarket chain with sample of 298 families. The results indicate there mainly findings, (a) parents prefer when children are in shopping cart, (b) children prefer to go in the buggy as there is a funny shopping experience, and (c) when children are walking, they interact more with the products in the supermarket, consequently, its family spend more than had planned. This paper has the following contributions. The paper offers a deeper understanding of how children behave in real settings, providing insights to retail managers on the dynamics of the store. In addition, we offer suggestions to retail managers on how to deploy a cart strategy that has potential to bring superior revenues. Lastly, our findings suggest that in some retail situation, the deployment of certain cart strategies can bring more security to the store.