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The presence of a written shopping list on a major grocery buying trip to the supermarket is tangible evidence of out‐of‐store planning by the shopper. This pre‐planning may influence both time spent in store and grocery expenditure, two factors of importance to supermarket retailers. Set in a New Zealand city, examines the extent to which a written grocery shopping list affects these two factors by comparing the behaviour of two matched samples, one with lists and one without. The findings are conclusive: written shopping lists significantly reduce average expenditure; the presence of children accompanying the shopper significantly increases expenditure and time spent in store. While supermarket retailers cannot dissuade customers from bringing a written shopping list to the store, they can encourage customers to spend more time in‐store, and to shop with someone else, thereby increasing average expenditure.

“Scripted behaviour” underpins many repetitive and routine tasks, such as grocery shopping, where it is observed that some shoppers take a list and others do not. The notion of “scripts” is used to examine the underlying reasons for the presence and absence of grocery shopping lists on major weekly or two‐weekly shopping trips to supermarkets. Little if any current information exists in marketing literature to fully explain the reasons for the presence or absence of lists, though it is known that such behaviour affects purchase activity in supermarkets. Set in New Zealand, this exploratory and preliminary study examines the shopping list being a moderator of purchase behaviour. It confirms previous research into the differences between list and non‐list grocery shoppers and suggests that far more planning occurs amongst all grocery shoppers than might be expected. The study reveals that some grocery shoppers, regardless of the presence or absence of a written shopping list, have a flexible approach to grocery shopping that is part of their overall shopping script. It is suggested that supermarket retailing planners could act on this intelligence in such a way as to support shoppers' pre‐planning, and thereby protect or increase their share of custom.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether there is a difference in the development of shopping lists and use of advertisements as pre-store food-buying practices in terms of planned shopping by South African consumers who dwell in different socio-economic status (SES) areas. The paper also considers the influence of shopper and socio-demographic characteristics on pre-store food-buying practices in a developing country.

A self-administered questionnaire was used to survey 1 200 consumers in retail stores in low, middle and high SES areas in South Africa. A generalised linear model was employed for the statistical analysis of pre-store food-buying practices within the SES area groups in a developing country.

South African consumers that reside in high SES area displayed the largest of shopping list development, while consumers who dwell in low SES areas showed the highest incidence of advertisement usage. Several shopper and socio-demographic characteristics were also found to have an influence on pre-store food-buying practices in different SES areas in South Africa.

A qualitative approach would offer a deeper understanding of consumers’ pre-store food shopping predispositions as opposed to the quantitative approach, which was adopted for this study. A longitudinal design would also provide a more extensive representation of pre-store food shopping practices over a longer time frame than cross-sectional research. The survey was conducted on Saturdays, whereas consumers who shop during the week may have different shopping and socio-demographic characteristics.

Astute food brands, marketers and grocery stores could use the findings of this study to assist with their marketing efforts that they direct at consumers in different SES areas in South Africa and other developing countries.

The findings of this study may assist consumers in developing countries, especially those who reside in low SES areas, with food-buying strategies to reduce food costs, make wiser purchase decisions and reduce shopping.

No study (to the best of the researchers’ knowledge) has considered shopping list development and use of advertisements’ pre-store food-buying practices in different SES areas in a developing country. Furthermore, there is a dearth of research analysing shopper and socio-demographic characteristics in relation to pre-store food-buying practices among different SES areas in developing and developed countries.

This paper aims to investigate grocery list use in the lives of participant families in a study on decision making about food choices and eating practices.

A total of 46 families from three ethno‐cultural groups living in two regions in Canada participated in the study: in British Columbia, 12 Punjabi Canadian and 11 European Canadian families; in Nova Scotia, 13 African Canadian and ten European Canadian families. In each family, at least three individuals over the age of 13 years, one of whom was a woman between the ages of 25 and 55 years, were interviewed. Researchers participated in a meal and accompanied each family on a grocery trip.

Most family members contributed to a grocery list. The shopper(s) in the family may take the written list with them, have the list in memory, use a combination of both memory and written list, or shop without a list. Finds the articulation of taken‐for‐granted, intersecting knowledge about family, household and grocery store, necessary to the compilation of a list, were largely unseen, unrecognised, and undervalued.

Studies on grocery lists have focused on who uses lists, how they are used, and what their use says about consumers. In the literature, non‐list use is conflated with the absence of a tangible grocery list. Shows that lack of a tangible list does not mean absence of a list in all cases. Further, extends and contextualises existing literature, showing that grocery list compilation relies upon interrelated knowledge of family, household and store.

Hungarian economy went through substantial changes in the past few decades and hypermarkets gained high popularity among customers, therefore profiling Hungarian hypermarket shoppers is essential to understand their behavior.

The paper investigates the profile of Hungarian hypermarket shoppers based on a wide questionnaire survey. In the presented research, Computer-Aided Personal Interviewing questionnaires were analyzed using multidimensional scaling and k-means clustering.

Results showed that Hungarian hypermarket shoppers regularly plan their shopping but they buy 8–9 items instead of the planned 4–5 items. However, only 25% of respondents reported the use of shopping list and in spite of the wide digital possibilities, they do not use their mobile devices neither for creating shopping list nor for checking coupons online.

This study explores the profile of Hungarian hypermarket shoppers, which may give additional information for the players of the retail environment about the customers' behavior and preferences.

The purpose of this paper is to identify similarities and differences with regard to factors affecting consumers' impulse purchases of groceries in France and Sweden.

Data were collected by a random survey of 202 Swedish and 368 French households. MANCOVA is the principal analytical technique.

The analysis indicates that, while Swedish shoppers make more impulse purchases, the French consumers appear to be more attentive to special in‐store displays and two‐for‐the‐price‐of‐one offerings. Contrary to expectations, the impulse purchases of French and Swedish shoppers are not predicted by gender.

Further studies should incorporate situational variables such as outline of stores and supermarkets and the specific country's food culture, since these factors affect shoppers' choices and shopping habits.

The findings help practitioners to understand how market‐specific factors affect shoppers' impulse purchases. These insights are important in the light of the increased internationalization of the supermarket chains' operations.

This study contributes to the current knowledge on consumers' impulse purchase behavior by demonstrating that, although the behavior as such is universal, there may be differences between countries with regard to the number of impulse purchases that shoppers make and how they respond to special in‐store displays and discount offerings.

The purposes of this paper are to propose a different profitability metric (i.e. anchor category profits) at the category level based on the concept of anchor categories and to illustrate how such a metric can be calculated in field settings to offer a balanced view of profit structure from both the accounting and marketing perspectives.

First, the concept of anchor categories is developed drawing on anchor effects theory and automatic cognitive processing theory. Based on anchor categories, this paper proposes a formula for calculating anchor category profits. Using the data collected with a survey instrument, this paper calculates accounting profits and anchor category profits for two grocery stores.

The intra-store analysis of accounting profits and anchor category profits reveals that the two profit measures project different profit contribution patterns by product categories for each store. The inter-store analysis provides quite different, yet useful information about profit structures for the two grocery stores. Although the two stores are similar in terms of accounting profits, their anchor category profits show different pictures regarding profit contribution patters by product categories between the two stores, revealing that different categories attract customers to different stores.

Comparing accounting profits and anchor category profits allows retail managers to identify traffic generator categories and cash generator categories, which helps retail managers develop more effective category management to increase storewide profits.

This paper increases understanding of the relationship between product categories and store choice behavior by offering a theoretical rationale to explain why some product categories influence consumers’ store choice. This paper also proposes anchor category profits as a more implementation-friendly category-level profitability metric that combines accounting principles with consumers’ shopping trip planning behavior.

Shopping bots are an important new innovation which support consumers with the product search and identification stage in e‐shopping. This paper reviews the search facilities offered by shopping bots. A number of shopping bots that include books in their product range, have been visited with a view to analysing their search facilities. Using trial searches for three different best‐selling books, title, author, and keyword search facilities available in a number of bots were further investigated. Finally the output from the search in terms of the number of items, and suppliers identified, and the price, was analysed. The effectiveness of bots does not only depend upon search facilities but also depends upon product coverage, and other added value features such as publisher and consumer reviews. Consumer search behaviour, in general, and the way in which consumers will use shopping bots are fruitful areas for further research.

This study aims to identify, within the context of the French fashion industry, the characteristics of multichannel shoppers, that is, consumers who use more than one channel in a single shopping trip. We especially investigate whether consumers' focus on quality versus price affects their multichannel shopping tendency and their flexibilities in their shopping lists (basket flexibility).

We surveyed a representative sample of 400 French shoppers regarding fashion apparel purchasing. We use a logistic regression framework to measure the probability of a shopper becoming a multichannel shopper based on the key constructs and a battery of control variables.

The analysis shows that, in fashion buying, shoppers focused on quality and those with high basket flexibility have a higher probability of becoming multichannel shoppers. The probability becomes even greater when a shopper is both quality oriented and has basket flexibility.

We focus on the fashion apparel market for a deeper understanding of multichannel usage of products with both experience and search features. Future research can investigate other industries for higher generalizability.

Our research provides insights into multichannel fashion companies whose managements aim to effectively manage high-value customers who tend to use more channels when shopping. Specifically, an omnichannel marketing strategy should focus on capturing the quality-oriented and highly basket-flexible segment of consumers.

Our study provides evidence that for products having high experiential as well as search features, quality-oriented and highly flexible shoppers engage more in multichannel shopping. Because these characteristics are related to the long-term value of customers, we provide the link between multichannel marketing and firm profitability in the context of the fashion industry.

Retailers who stay open for longer times may be overestimating demand during these times and might struggle to turn round a profit by operating extended trading hours. This paper aims to analyse the frequency and time at which consumers make unscheduled store visits in order to suggest ways that retailers might use to attract more patronage in this mode of grocery shopping.

The research methodology includes administration of a structured questionnaire among randomly selected shoppers, exiting two supermarkets across a major Australian city. The survey seeks information about various aspects of shopping behaviour, in a range of contexts and within selected demographics. Two econometric models aimed at predicting frequencies and times of the day that shoppers do unscheduled shopping are constructed.

The study identifies shopping profiles of consumers who are inclined to make unscheduled visits to the grocers.

The investigation does not discriminate between idiosyncratic unscheduled purchase behaviour during extended trading times on weekdays and weekends. Greater understanding of the extenuating factors that encourage unscheduled shopping on Sundays will give an added dimension to the policy issues debate on Sunday trading.

Retailers can attempt to condition their patrons to expand purchases during the time the store keeps its doors open longer.

The findings could impel retailers during the extended trading times, to take affirmative actions to make customers' unscheduled visits more experiential, and help the stores achieve higher customer outlays.