Time, Space, and Shopping: The Regulation of Shopping Hours

Abstract

Few would dispute that shopping is costly and that time is among the more significant costs. Time enters the cost of shopping in a number of different ways, perhaps most directly by diverting from other activities the time needed to plan purchases, search for selection, travel to store locations, and queue for service. Because the time spent shopping is often independent of the quantity of goods purchased, households economize by choosing to shop discretely through time. An optimal shopping frequency is chosen by trading off the falling (per unit time) cost of postponing a shopping trip with the rising cost of holding higher levels of inventories. While time costs may be independent of the quantities purchased, the time spent shopping is not independent of the store's location. Reducing the distance between a household and its shopping area reduces directly the time spent in each trip and lowers the cost of the optimal plan. Indirectly, the time spent shopping can be reduced by combining shopping with other activities (e.g., dropping the laundry off on the way to work or buying milk on the way home from a party). The household's ability to take advantage of the particularities of time and place is a function of the length of time that