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The purpose of this paper is to study the interrelationships among grocery store image, travel distance (TD), customer satisfaction, and behavioral intentions (BI) in a college town setting.

Surveys are given to undergraduate college student grocery shoppers in a Midwest college town. The 400 usable questionnaires are randomly divided into two parts: one subsample was used for exploratory factor analysis while the other (larger) subsample was used for confirmatory factor analysis and subsequently the structural path analysis.

Grocery store image is identified as a second‐order construct reflected by the three key components of merchandise attributes (MEA), store ambience and service (SAS), and marketing attractiveness (MGA). Although store image is an important driver of BI, its indirect effect through customer satisfaction is found to be substantially greater than its direct effect on BI. Interestingly, TD is positively related to satisfaction, which highlights the possibility for retailers to overcome the distance disadvantage.

As few studies have attempted to characterize the US grocery market in terms of the reasons for their choice, this exploratory study is unique because it investigates grocery shopping behavior in a traditional American college town. Specifically, the distinctive market factors (e.g. the relative scarcity of grocery retailers, their distance from campus, and the mix of grocer types in or around the Midwest college town) add value and contribute to the retailing literature.

This study examines customers of grocers who provide both online and traditional in‐store options to determine if there are substantial differences in customer's perceptions of service quality, product quality, product range, and sacrifices made when using a specific channel. By better understanding customer preferences, firms can appropriately match strategy and market expectations.

Data were gathered from 271 traditional in‐store customers and 1,720 online customers from three grocers. Survey results from these two groups was analyzed using regression analysis consisting of independent variables measuring the sacrifices of using a given channel, and the quality of service, products and product range and dependent variables of behavioral intentions and percent of business given to the grocer.

Online customers have a higher level of satisfaction with their service encounters, but lower levels with the tangible aspects of product quality, range of products available and channel usage sacrifices. They also spend a larger portion of their grocery “wallet” with the grocer and are less price sensitive than their in‐store counterparts.

Online customers place a premium on convenience and will spend more with firms that meet this need. Given the very low profit margins in this industry, the ability to draw and retain these customers is vitally important.

This study presents one of the first direct comparisons of customers who use two different channels from the same grocery provider to examine customer perceptions for improved strategic service and product delivery.

Grounded on approach/avoidance behaviour theory, the purpose of this paper is to develop a typology of grocery shoppers based on the concomitant perceived advantages and disadvantages of shopping online and in store for a single cohort of consumers who buy groceries in both channels.

A survey design was employed using a sample of 871 UK shoppers who had purchased groceries online and offline. The survey instrument contained items that measured the perceived advantages and disadvantages of grocery shopping online, and items relating to the perceived advantages and disadvantages of grocery shopping in traditional supermarkets. Items were selected from the extant literature and subjected to content and face validity checks. Cluster analysis was used to develop typologies of online and offline grocery shoppers. The inter-relation between the two typology sets was then examined.

The results of the research provide several insights into the characteristics, perceptions and channel patronage preferences of grocery shoppers. In particular, profiling e-grocery shoppers on the basis of their concomitant perceptions of shopping online and in store suggests that the choice of whether to shop online or in store may be driven not by the perceived advantages of one channel vs the other, but by the desire to avoid the greater disadvantages of the alternative. These perceptions differ somewhat between different consumer groups.

This study makes a noteworthy contribution to the internet and general shopping literature by providing a profile of grocery shoppers based on their concomitant and often conflicting perceived advantages and disadvantages of shopping online and their perceived advantages and disadvantages of shopping in traditional supermarkets. The use of a single cohort of consumers overcomes the bias in previous studies that employ separate cohorts of online and offline shoppers and reveal important insights into the complex perceptions and behaviours of multichannel grocery shoppers.

Grocery retailers are operating in a slow‐growth market. The pursuit of market share is one of the main concerns for retail managers. The retail structure is becoming increasingly standardized and homogenous because of concentration of the ownership of stores. Cultural differences remain, however, between different European countries. Cultural factors influence the success of a positioning strategy. This study examined how consumers perceive grocery retail formats and brands in Finland. Data from personal interviews were used in highlighting the consumer perspective. Consumers perceive meaningful differences in various store formats, meanwhile store brands are seen as quite similar. Consumers rely on functional attributes of stores when discussing grocery stores. However, it seems that consumers are unable to recognize the fabricated, often imaginary differences at the brand level. The informant’s own, creative symbolic work results in this case to interpreting all grocery retail brands as similar. Managerial implications of the study are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain how elements of the built environment may or may not influence the frequency of grocery shopping.

Using data from the 2009 Seattle Obesity Study, the research investigated the effect of the urban built environment on grocery shopping travel frequency in the Seattle-King County area. Binary and ordered logit models served to estimate the impact of individual characteristics and built environments on grocery shopping travel frequency.

The results showed that the respondents’ attitude towards food, travel mode, and the network distance between homes and stores exerted the strongest influence on the travel frequency while urban form variables only had a modest influence. The study showed that frequent shoppers were more likely to use alternative transportation modes and shopped closer to their homes and infrequent shoppers tended to drive longer distances to their stores and spent more time and money per visit.

This research has implications for urban planners and policy makers as well as grocery retailers, as the seemingly disparate groups both have an interest in food shopping frequency.

Few studies in the planning or retail literature investigate the influence of the urban built environment and the insights from the planning field. This study uses GIS and a planning framework to provide information that is relevant for grocery retailers and those invested in food distribution.

To find out if and how delivery charge and three other situational factors affect consumers' grocery shopping channel choice.

A survey was conducted among a convenience sample of 152 supermarket shoppers in South England. Each respondent was presented with two hypothetical grocery shopping scenarios characterised by four situational factors. Respondents were asked to indicate their preference for shopping online or in‐store in each described situation. They also provided information about their last grocery shopping trip.

The results show that all four situational factors affect consumers' shopping channel preference. It was further established that, though of influence, delivery charges are not the most important factor. Fifteen minutes difference in travel time to the grocery store had a greater impact on the relative preference to shop online or in‐store than a delivery fee of £5.

Although experimentally controlled, the findings are based on behavioural intentions and not on real market behaviour. Also, they are based on a convenience sample of intercepted shoppers only.

Attempts to promote online grocery shopping should focus on communicating the time savings gained by shopping online rather than lowering delivery charges.

Only few studies have investigated effects of situational factors, including delivery charges, on consumer channel choice for grocery shopping. Experimental studies are particularly scarce.

This article seeks to understand whether Indian consumers are likely to move from traditional kirana stores to large organized retailers while shopping for groceries.

Two hypotheses were proposed: H1: customer patronage differs for different grocery store attributes and H2: customer perceptions of grocery store attributes differ for kirana stores and organized retailers. The study was carried out across four Indian cities‐ two major and two smaller cities with around 100 respondents from each city. Stratified systematic sampling design with a sample size of 409 was used for the study. Multivariate statistical techniques were used to analyze the data collected with the help of a structured questionnaire.

Customer patronage to grocery stores was found to be positively related to location, helpful, trustworthy salespeople, home shopping, cleanliness, offers, quality and negatively related to travel convenience. Kiranas do well on location but poorly on cleanliness, offers, quality, and helpful trustworthy salespeople. The converse is true for organized retailers.

Kiranas have major disadvantages on all customer perception scores except location. These scores being less important determinants of patronage compared with location, in the short run kiranas may not be ousted out of customers’ favour. However, in the long run if they do not work on these other factors, they would face oblivion.

Kiranas need to upgrade their facilities to be able to compete with the organized retailers, who are expected to improve their location scores rapidly in the near future.

The paper predicts whether the foray of large organized grocery retailing would close down millions of kirana shops and result in loss of livelihood, suggesting measures to counter the onslaught.

The advent of grocery sales through online channels necessitates that bricks-and-mortar retailers redefine their logistics networks if they want to compete online. Because the general understanding of such bricks-and-clicks logistics systems for grocery is still limited, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the internal logistics networks used to serve customers across channels by means of an exploratory study with retailers from different contexts.

A total of 12 case companies from six European countries participated in this exploratory study. Face-to-face interviews with managers were the primary source for data collection. The heterogeneity of the sample enabled the authors to build a typology of logistics networks in grocery retailing on multiple channels and to understand the advantages of different warehousing, picking, internal transportation and last-mile delivery systems.

Bricks-and-mortar grocery retailers are leveraging their existing logistics structures to fulfill online orders. Logistics networks are mostly determined by the question of where to split case packs into customer units. In non-food logistics, channel integration is mostly seen as beneficial, but in grocery retailing, this depends heavily on product, market and retailer specifics. The data from the heterogeneous sample reveal six distinct types for cross-channel order fulfillment.

The qualitative analysis of different design options can serve as a decision support for retailers developing logistics networks to serve customers across channels.

The paper shows the internal and external factors that drive the decision-making for omni-channel (OC) logistics networks for previously store-based grocery retailers. Thereby, it makes a step toward building a contingency and configuration theory of retail networks design. It discusses in particular the differences between grocery and non-food OC retailing, last-mile delivery systems and market characteristics in the decision-making of retail networks design.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive set of grocery store attributes that can be standardized and used in empirical research aiming at increasing retailers’ understanding of determinants of grocery store choice, and assessing how the relative importance of the attributes is affected by consumer socio-demographic characteristics and shopping behaviour.

An internet survey of 1,575 Swedish consumers was conducted. A large set of attributes was rated by the participants on seven-point scales with respect to their importance for choice of grocery store. Principal component analysis (PCA) resulted in a reduced set of reliably measured aggregated attributes. This set included the attractiveness attributes price level, supply range, supply quality, service quality, storescape quality, facilities for childcare, and closeness to other stores, and the accessibility attributes easy access by car, easy access by other travel modes, and availability (closeness to store and opening hours).

The results showed that accessibility by car is the most important grocery store attribute, storescape quality and availability the next most important and facilities for childcare the least important. It was also found that socio-demographic factors and shopping behaviour have an impact on the importance of the store attributes.

A comprehensive set of attractiveness and accessibility attributes of grocery stores that can be standardized and used in empirical research is established. The results are valid for the Swedish-European conditions that differ from the conditions in North America where most previous research has been conducted. The results reveal the relative importance grocery-shopping consumers place on controllable attractiveness attributes compared to uncontrollable accessibility attributes as well as the relative importance of the attributes within each category.

The purpose of this research was to study the nature and extent of differences, if any, between male and female grocery shoppers in terms of grocery shopping behavior and attitudes and with respect to those store criteria that are important in selecting a food store. The results suggest that the underlying constructs influencing grocery shopping behavior and attitudes are basically the same for the male and female shoppers; however, the findings indicated that the degree to which some of these behavior/attitude factors impact resulted in a difference in grocery shopping patterns between the sexes. Further, even though some differences were observed in the relative importance rankings of 22 store‐selection criteria, the overriding pattern was one of congruence between the two groups of respondents. The paper concludes with a discussion of the strategic implications of the findings for the food retailer.