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In the age of “big data,” one of the most important capabilities that differentiates the winners from the losers in the intensely competitive grocery market is how successfully a firm can harness its vast amounts of shopper data to become more shopper-centric. Grocery retailers struggle with how to manage the tremendous amount of data available to them and best leverage their frequent shopper data to derive insights. These data also present an opportunity for academic research on decision-making and evaluation of strategic initiatives. This chapter discusses three case studies that illustrate the various capabilities of frequent shopper data in generating shopper insights. Specifically, using frequent shopper data for millions of shoppers, the three case studies demonstrate how frequent shopper data can be used as an important information asset for understanding differences and similarities among different shopper groups (Case Study 1), as a means to assess the effectiveness of store redesigns/environment changes (Case Study 2), and as a key tool for evaluating program success (Case Study 3). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how successful collaboration between practitioners and academics can be a boon to both business success and academic research.

Purpose – This chapter seeks to understand what occurred with five different types of crime among eight retail sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2021 to allow retailers to respond to crime, risk, and loss.

Methodology/Approach – Data as reported by police in seven major US cities during the first six months of 2019, 2020, and 2021 were analyzed from a Routine Activities perspective.

Findings – The study results show that crime varied by type and location during COVID-19.

Originality/Value – This analysis provides the first examination of crime across several types and eight retail sectors.

Inner city centers not only provide opportunities for shopping, dining, and entertainment, but with their lively atmosphere and other vital attributes, also create attractive destinations for residents and tourists alike. However, inner city retailing, potentially the most important reason to visit an inner city, is facing serious competition from e-commerce and out-of-town shopping malls. Dying inner city centers have become a severe issue in recent years, worldwide. To counteract this devastating trend and ensure the vitality and viability of inner city centers, stakeholders from the public and private sectors regularly join their forces in initiatives to strengthen urban structures. However, academic insights into the contribution of retailing on perceived city attractiveness remain sparse. Relying on an extensive data set that combines survey and observational data, the authors are able to quantify a variety of inner city characteristics, ranging from its store and service provider portfolio to its ambience and accessibility, and measure their association with its perceived attractiveness. They show that a city's portfolio of retail stores is not only related to people's perceptions of the city's overall attractiveness but also perceptions of its ambience. However, not all retail categories contribute the same way; while the presence of clothing stores or booksellers is strongly associated with cities' ambience as well as attractiveness, other retail categories such as optometrists or electronics stores are negatively associated with consumers' inner city perceptions. Importantly, these relationships also depend on the size of the focal city. Based on their results, the authors provide important managerial and societal implications on how to leverage the local retailing environment to improve inner city attractiveness. For example, the results may inform (local) governments on which sectors to subsidize in order to attract those store and service provider categories that benefit inner city attractiveness.

The complex value chain that facilitates local food production and consumption includes purveyors positioned across a range of marketspaces who through the various ways they present and sell their products help create and convey the meaning of “local food.” Limited governance within local food systems (LFSs) and a lack of consensus on the definition of “local food” provide purveyors with notable latitude in how they frame the meaning of “local” in the food products they produce, market, and sell. Consequently, the expansion of food products that are framed as being “local” within conventional marketspaces threatens to convolute the meaning and representation of local food within specific LFSs and across the broader local food movement (LFM). Here, I use a structured photo analysis design to explore the elements that influence the visual representation of “local food” by purveyors within five farmers’ markets and five grocery stores located across the Southern Arizona LFS (SALFS). I consider the farmers’ markets to be alternative marketspaces and the grocery stores to be conventional marketspaces. The data consist of 683 original photos taken of local food framing practices within the farmers’ markets and grocery stores and extensive field notes captured throughout multiple direct observations at each market space. My exploration is guided by a theoretical framework composed of constructs specific to institutional logic, product framing, and taste regimes. The findings illustrate how local food framing practices across alternative and mainstream marketspaces foster a local food taste regime that fails to convey the fundamental principles and values of the LFM. Recommendations for both practice and research are developed from the findings.

In the context of increasing competition between chained retailers and family-owned retailers, it is key to understand the customer's format choice. Using a logistics regression (i.e., binary logit) model, we explain customers' preference to buy in supermarkets or in small-scale, mom-and-pop stores like nanostores. We collect a representative sample of over 110 surveys from customers in the district of Surco, Lima, Perú, which is a representative area of the features of Lima's residents. We asked customers to focus on analyzing their preference between two retail formats: modern channel (i.e., big-box retailers, supermarkets, and hypermarkets) and traditional channel (i.e., mom-and-pop stores, nanostores). Our surveys included factors pertaining retail format attributes as well as factors related to the purchasing process. The results showed that time available for purchase and a comparatively better perceived service at a mom-and-pop store (i.e., nanostore) are significant factors that explain a higher probability of selecting these retailers, while a better store's ambience benefits more supermarkets. The overall discrete choice model is able to explain 65% of the variance using pseudo R-squared of the actual format choice decisions.

While the popular image of the Sherman Act is that of a “trust-busting” statute, conduct remedies have been more common than structural relief. This paper evaluates the effect on economic welfare of conduct remedies that have resulted from ten prominent Sherman Act monopolization cases. In general, we find that in some cases the behavioral relief has had no consequence other than the cost of litigation and cost of compliance; in other cases, the remedies probably reduced consumer welfare. Cases studied are United Shoe Machinery, AT&T, Std. Oil of California, IBM, United Fruit, Kodak, Safeway, GM, Jerrold, and Blue Chip Stamp.

This chapter looks at how Latin American immigrants go about shopping for groceries in Nashville, Tennessee, and relates this simple act to a wider political economy. The chapter examines the act of shopping for groceries and the immigrants' preferences through elements largely ignored by the prevailing economic paradigm. To some extent, the immigrants are aware that their mode of shopping is not entirely “rational” and that their choices are often informed by nothing more than “feelings” toward a place or product. The ethnography examines how the immigrants deal with their now dislocated practice of shopping in their everyday life in the new city. In examining this process, the ethnography considers the public spaces in which the practice of shopping takes place, and includes both those stores catering directly to immigrants and those serving a wider market.

Scholarship on alternative organizations and cooperatives has argued that networks and intermediaries foster organizational form stability and protect collectivist-democratic organizations from rationalization as well as decoupling. This study of field-level organizing among food co-ops in the United States shows that rather than buffering collectivist organizations from conventional market and rationalization pressures, meta-organizations can also serve as a conduit for rationalizing pressures, subjecting vulnerable organizations to what I call quasi-coercive isomorphism. Using interviews of field participants, ethnographic observations of conferences, and content analysis of organizational documents, I examine the formation and impact of National Co+op Grocers, a meta-cooperative created to leverage scale and pool resources among food co-ops. I find that this meta-organization enforced grocery industry-oriented norms of operation, management, and presentation among its member organizations in return for providing mutual liability and economies of scale. This focus on select operationally scalable processes and structures for support generated isomorphic pressures that exposed, rather than sheltered, co-ops, especially smaller, resource-poor ones, from industry standards. The meta-organization thus promoted a sectorized model of more marketized practices for the field’s cooperatives that pushed co-ops to adopt conventional grocery store practices and distanced them from the practices of other cooperative form fields. Moreover, the potential of cooperative form-specific elements for scaling was not realized: collective ownership and democratic governance remained local concerns. These findings suggest that whether meso-level cooperation among cooperatives can support alternative form maintenance is contingent on the structure and scope of the meta-organization and on the perceived scalability of operational and governance elements of the cooperative organizational form.

Retail marketing is in the midst of an evolution. The paradigm is shifting from a product-centric to a consumer-centric focus, with a particular emphasis on understanding how consumers transition from harboring an interest in a product to actually purchasing that product. In response, shopper marketing, and in-store marketing (ISM) in particular, have emerged as important mechanisms to influence shopper behavior in brick & mortar and online retail environments. The academic literature is replete with work on what factors of ISM influence shopper behavior. In this chapter, we categorize prominent streams of findings on ISM into firm, customer, competitor and product characteristics of ISM and examine how the notion of a “store” is evolving from bricks to clicks – namely from physical formats to online shopping experiences. Insights from this chapter will help retailers and store managers identify what their customers respond to within a physical store, how technology is changing the way they can capture information on customers, and how shopper behavior is evolving in response to brick & mortar and online retail environments.

The COVID-19 pandemic had severely impacted global commerce, leading to market closure and travel restrictions. Due to the extreme limitations on shopping and market possibilities, consumers’ buying habits have changed significantly and they are still changing what they buy and how they purchase for everyday necessities. They are trying to shop locally, carefully, and economically. Consumers are buying their stuff from wherever goods are available. Purchasing nonessential items is restricted. Restaurants, tourism, apparel, and furniture are the industries that have been impacted the most. The objective behind this study is to find out the post-COVID-19 effects on consumer buying of essentials from a convenience store over hypermarkets and how consumer behavior will revive postpandemic toward retail shopping. In the study, responses were collected through structured questionnaire to explore the consumer buying behavior for their daily essentials both at convenience stores and hypermarkets. The study reveals that consumers prefer to buy essential commodities/goods of daily needs from convenience store compared to hypermarket due to the risk of being exposed to COVID-19 pandemic and this behavior will change future trend of retail shopping experience. The major limitation of the study is sampling frame. Future studies can replicate this study in different context with different target population. Pertaining to the current ongoing situations of the pandemic, a very high percentage of the respondents would still choose nearby convenience stores over hypermarkets. This study estimates the behavioral change in retail consumers in future; therefore, it suggests retailers adopt innovative marketing strategy in future.