Progressive Grocer Research Articles

Back to the future of digital price display: Analyzing patents and other archives to understand contemporary market innovations.

The article explores reasons for the lack of success of digital electronic shelf labels (ESLs) in US retail settings. It suggests that these reasons can be traced by referring to the triple meaning of 'digital': 'Digital' now means electronic, but the word also long encompassed numerals - a digit is a number - and body parts - digitus is the Latin word for the finger, that is, the index we use to point at things or manipulate them. The current fate of ESLs is linked to a long history that combined these three dimensions. The study unfolds along a twofold narrative. First, it reviews the recent introduction of ESLs in the United States based on the reading of papers and advertisements published in Progressive Grocer, a leading trade press magazine. Then, it goes 'back to the future' by exploring the roots of ESLs over a century. This historical study is based on the analysis of the evolution of US price tag patents (through a network study of patents citations and their evolution); the network analysis is complemented with the history of the US price tag market (through the knowledge gained from Progressive Grocer). The results show that digital price fixing depends on past and present systems and infrastructures, cost constraints and payback schemes, legal frameworks, and social projects.

Price display technologies and price ceiling policies: governing prices in the WWII and postwar US economy (1940–1953)

AbstractThis article explores the politics and technologies of price fixing and price display in US grocery stores in the mid-20th century. Drawing on the literature on market devices and policy instruments, it complements previous studies focused on price setting processes by stressing the importance of price display. Through a systematic reading of the trade journal The Progressive Grocer, the article shows how displaying prices during World War II and the postwar inflation period combined the mastery of Government authorities at the federal level, and the expertise of retail professionals at the shelf level. It demonstrates that the regulation of prices is linked to mundane policies, technologies and practices, in particular the technique of ‘stereoscopic prices’ aimed at linking a reference price (the ceiling price set by the government) and the selling price (the actual price set by the retailer). Such technologies proved able to reinvent prices and price competition through their ‘bifurcated agency’, i.e. their propensity to both enact the scripts delegated to them (conveying price ceilings) and produce major side effects, like generalizing the practice of price display and linking prices to new values and qualitative dimensions of grocery products.

The ethno-graphy of prices: On the fingers of the invisible hand (1922-1947)

This article is part of a project examining the long-term process of price display digitalization, ranging from manually written prices to contemporary electronic shelf labels. Based on the etymology of the term ‘digital’ (from digitus, finger or toe), we intend to show that the display of prices in retail settings surprisingly rests on a long-term digitalization process that started in the early 20th century. The study is based on a systematic reading of the trade magazine The Progressive Grocer during its first decades (1922-1947). This magazine assisted independent American grocers in their move from counter-service to self-service, and in facing the challenges of new competitors like chain stores and supermarkets. In this process, the disclosure of prices and their proper writing—their ethno-graphy—was central. We focus on a crucial and transitional period: the move from coded to open prices. This period entailed a double development of price ‘fingerization’ (using the fingers to write the prices) and price ‘de-fingerization’ (getting rid of handwriting thanks to novel price tag and printing devices). Ethnographying these mundane evolutions illuminates the role of the fingers of the invisible hand that animates the market, so to say.

Open-display and the ‘re-agencing’ of the American economy: Lessons from a ‘pico-geography’ of grocery stores in the USA, 1922–1932

This paper aims to describe marketization processes in terms of ‘market agencing’. The agencing framework is presented through the study of the Progressive Grocer, a trade magazine that presented new ideas about the grocery business and proposed novel ‘agencements’ for American grocery stores in the early 1920s. The case shows that agencing consists of combining the agency of grocers and market devices to shape a different retail environment; that is, a new ‘agencement’ as a situated and flexible combination of market equipment and managerial logics. The paper shows how the introduction of ‘open display’ – that is, providing a better visual access to the goods while preserving service – introduced new furniture and ideas, and thus eased the transition from counter service to self-service. The first section presents the agencing framework, the empirical source, The Progressive Grocer, and the method used to analyse it. This method is labelled ‘pico-geography’. The idea is to conduct analysis on an even smaller scale than micro-geography by focusing on spatial reconfigurations that occur at the indoor and store level. The second section presents the concept of the open display and describes how it contributed to ‘re-agence’ the grocery equipment, workforce and even consumers. The third section puts this journey into perspective, revealing that, though promoted by The Progressive Grocer, it was also part of a larger reconfiguration involving several other actors. The conclusion stresses the empirical, methodological and theoretical contribution of the paper.

\u201cMaking people buy and eat differently\u201d: lessons from the modernisation of small independent grocery stores in the early twentieth century

Food studies teach us much about foods and eaters, but despite their impressive coverage and richness, they pay little attention to what occurs between the two: they tend to neglect the many market professionals and “market-things” that act as a bridge between food products and consumers. This paper proposes to fill the gap by examining how the transformation of the grocery business and related techniques contributed to reshaping the food industry’s strategies, the content of foods and the identity of eaters. This investigation was conducted by studying the trade magazine Progressive Grocer over the period 1922–1959. It shows how the journal promoted a new art of “making people buy and eat”. Grocers were invited to modify their practices, hence the eaters’ experience, by implementing two different strategies: a movement of “betterment” of their previous service know-how and then a more radical movement of “replacement” of this know-how by the new “self-service” arrangement. By following these two movements, we understand how grocery professionals and techniques made us buy and eat, but made us do so differently, to the extent that the grocery business and related devices changed foods as well as consumers’ identities.

‘HOW TO BUILD DISPLAYS THAT SELL’

Instead of looking at performativity in economics and politics, this paper proposes to explore the economic politics of performativity. More precisely, it focuses on the politics of Progressive Grocer, a trade journal which from the early 1920s thrived by promoting new ways to modernize the grocery business for a readership of small independent grocers. This journal faced a dilemma: while it had to bring some new thoughts, behavior and objects into the real world, it could achieve this goal only through paper means. Progressive Grocer shows how thoroughly such a dilemma can be overcome. This magazine does almost everything that can be done through the mediation of simple paper. Progressive Grocer implements a true politics of performativity. This politics consists of introducing a new kind of text, distinct from economic theories and managerial textbooks. Instead of just putting words into its pages in the hope that they would ultimately shape the external reality, Progressive Grocer relies on a language that mixes what is said and what it does, signs and artifacts, reports of actual practices and dreamed states of commerce.

Forty years of Out-of-Stock research – and shelves are still empty

This article examines 40 years of research conducted in the area of Out-of-Stocks (OOS). Two research streams originating from the Progressive Grocer (1968) study are reviewed. The first stream dealt with demand side issues and analysed consumer responses to OOS. The other dealt with supply side issues and analysed the extent and root causes of OOS situations as well as how to improve OOS. Four paradoxes are derived from the review and are discussed: 1) OOS rates largely seem to fall into an average level at about 7 to 8% despite 40 years of research; 2) only sparse attempts have been made to integrate the two research streams; 3) there is an emphasis on minimizing OOS rather than relying on basic trade-offs as addressed by Economic-Order-Quantity theory to optimize OOS levels; and 4) despite clear evidence of the store as the major contributor to OOS situations, the store has largely remained a ‘black-box’ in OOS research. Finally, the study suggests that OOS research can integrate the notions of the two streams by showing how the conditions for consumer responses can be translated into different degrees for costs of understocking taken from Economic-Order-Quantity theory. This will have important implications for the management of OOS.

Sign Story: Shifting Discourse on 'signage' in Progressive Grocer Magazine, or the Supermarket Under Late Capitalism

Sign Story: Shifting Discourse on 'signage' in Progressive Grocer Magazine, or the Supermarket Under Late Capitalism

Driving a Shopping Cart from STS to Business, and the Other Way Round: On the Introduction of Shopping Carts in American Grocery Stores (1936—1959)

This paper proposes to address the `does STS mean business' debate by telling the weird empirical story of the introduction of shopping carts in American grocery stores from their early beginnings in 1936 to their ubiquitous presence by the end of the 1950s, based on a systematic reading of the trade journal Progressive Grocer over the period. Through this story, the author intends to show that `business studies' may benefit from an STS-derived symmetrical look at market actors and their objects based on an `archaeology of present times'. In stressing the ambiguities of the case, he also argues that STS should study contemporary flexible forms of organizing.

Asymmetric Promotion Effects and Brand Positioning

Several studies have shown that promotions of national brands yield more effect than those of store brands (e.g., Allenby and Rossi 1991, Blattberg and Wisniewski 1989). However, the evolution of price-quality data available from Consumer Reports over the last 15 years seems to reveal a reduction of the quality gap between store brands and national brands, while price differences remain substantial. Simultaneously, the share of private label brands has increased (Progressive Grocer 1994). In this context, we study whether we can maintain a view of the world where national brands may easily attract consumers from store brands through promotions, whereas store brands are relatively ineffective in attracting consumers from national brands by such means. We analyze consumer reactions to price discounts in a parsimonious preference model featuring loss aversion and reference-dependence along dimensions of price and quality (Hardie, Johnson, and Fader 1993, Tversky and Kahneman 1991). The key result of our analysis is that, given any two brands, there is an asymmetric promotion effect in favor of the higher quality/higher price brands if and only if the quality gap between the brands is sufficiently large in comparison with the price gap. Thus, the direction of promotion asymmetry is not unconditional. It depends uniquely on the value of the ratio of quality and price differences compared to a category specific criterion, which we call Φ. If the ratio of quality and price differences is larger than this criterion, the usual asymmetry prevails; if such is not the case, the lower quality/lower price brands promote more effectively. More precisely, our model predicts that cross promotion effects depend on two components of brand positioning in the price/quality quadrant. First, we define a variable termed “positioning advantage” that indicates whether, relative to the standards achieved by another brand, a given brand is underpriced (positive advantage) or overpriced (negative advantage). Promotion effectiveness is increasing in this variable. Second, cross promotion effects between two brands depend on their distance in the price/quality quadrant. This variable impacts promotion effectiveness negatively and symmetrically for any pair of brands. “Positioning advantage” and “brand distance” are orthogonal components of brand positioning, irrespective of the degree of correlation between available price and quality levels in the market. Empirically, we investigate the role of brand positioning in explaining cross promotion effects using panel data from the chilled orange juice and peanut butter categories. We compute the independent positioning variables, “positioning advantage” and “brand distance,” from readily available data on price and quality positioning after obtaining our estimates of Φ. We next measure promotion effectiveness by estimating choice share changes in response to a price discount, using a choice model that does not contain any information about quality/price ratios. Finally, we test the relation between the two positioning variables and the promotion effectiveness measures. The data reveal that in the orange juice category lower quality/lower price brands generally promote more effectively than higher quality/higher price brands. In the peanut butter data the opposite asymmetry holds. In both cases, inter-brand promotion patterns are well explained by the positioning variables. An attractive feature of our model is that, in addition to the direction of promotion asymmetries, it also explains the extent of those asymmetries. A further interesting aspect of this approach is that we go beyond a categorization of brands into price tiers. For instance, lower tier brands in our data may promote more effectively than one national brand but less effectively than another. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, the data presented here seem to confirm that such cases occur because the lower tier brand offers a favorable trade-off of price and quality differences compared with one national brand and a less favorable trade-off compared with the other. The content of this paper is potentially relevant for brand managers or retailers concerned with predicting the impact of their promotions. The paper is of particular interest to marketing scientists who study the performance of store brands versus national brands and may also appeal to those who wish to explore the marketing implications of behavioral decision theory. Finally, our investigation does not reject Blattberg and Wisniewski’s (1989) finding, shared by Allenby and Rossi (1991) and Hardie, Johnson, and Fader (1993), that national brands have a principle advantage in promotion effectiveness. Rather, it formalizes when this principle advantage is overruled by positioning disadvantages of such brands.

Consumer Knowledge of Food Prices as an Indicator of Shopping Effectiveness

T HE study of consumers' knowledge of food prices has a relatively long tradition in marketing. Numerous food price recall studies have established that consumers' knowledge of prices is rather low. Gabor and Granger,' for example, reported that 65% of over 400 respondents did not know the correct prices of grocery products. Similarly, a Progressive Grocer study has shown that less than 50% of consumers were able to specify the correct price of 57 out of 59 supermarket items studied; and in some extreme cases only 10-20% of the study respondents knew the correct price.2 Many other studies have arrived at similar results.3 Such findings are usually regarded as having managerial implications, since they bear on the question of consumer sensitivity to price differences among products.4