Grocery Shopping Behavior Research Articles

The Food and Grocery Shopping Behaviour of Disadvantaged Consumers: Some Results from the Cardiff Consumer Panel

This paper examines the routine convenience shopping behaviour of two groups of disadvantaged consumers: households containing unemployed adults and households containing retired adults. Some hypotheses relating their behaviour to stereotypes of 'subsistence consumers' are tested against findings from the Cardiff Consumer Panel survey of 1982. It is shown that the 'unemployed' and 'retired' groups did not generally possess attitudes to shopping consistent with this stereotype, and that the food and grocery shopping expenditure and store choice patterns of the 'unemployed' were in general similar to those of the control group, except that superstores were used less and distances travelled to major grocery shopping opportunities were shorter. The retired also travelled shorter distances, and were more likely to use independent or affiliated stores than were the other groups. The implications of these findings for further geographic research and retail planning are discussed briefly.

HOUSEHOLDS' GROCERY SHOPPING BEHAVIOR IN THE SHORT-RUN: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

This paper extends the study of nonmarket work activities to explain the impact of household characteristics on grocery shopping behavior. A constrained utility maximization model is developed and the equilibrium conditions of the model are derived. These conditions and the hypotheses implied by them relating to the determinants of time spent in a grocery shopping trip, the size of a purchase, and the number of such trips within a given period of time were tested using data from a sample which identified the household characteristics of grocery shoppers. In these tests, using two-stage least squares, the theoretical implications of our simultaneous equations model are significantly supported.

Household inventory behavior: An empirical investigation of grocery purchases

Theoretical studies have recently drawn attention to the significance of non-durable commodity holdings by households. The present paper is an effort to find empirical evidence that household inventory behavior has definable properties. A large set of grocery purchase data, the Chicago Tribune Consumer Panel, is investigated. On the basis of the analysis it is suggested that grocery shopping behavior broadly conforms to that anticipated by inventory theory and that the rate of discount applied on these holdings varies negatively with income across households.