Household’s Shopping Behaviors

Household’s Shopping Behaviors

The article “A Model of Household Grocery Shopping Behavior” is about consumers’ shopping behavior that households “seek to minimize the travel cost associated with shopping and the cost of holding goods in inventory”. (Bawa and Ghosh, 1999) The authors believe that the shopping trip to the grocery store is one of the most basic elements of consumer behavior. When quick shoppers made large number of trips and spend small amounts per trip, the regular shoppers made less frequent but higher expenditure trips.

From the authors’ shopping model, one household’s shopping costs include cost of good, the household’s demand for goods and the prices related to those goods; travel cost, transportation cost that travel to the store and the opportunity cost of time spent in shopping; also inventory cost reflects “the opportunity costs of tying up capital in inventory and allocating physical storage space to it”. (Bawa and Ghosh, 1999) Each household has different shopping costs that are depended on household demand. Meanwhile, the household demand and strip frequency is decided by the household size, household income, employment status and other factors. When household size is big, the shopper need to buy larger quantities of products and large amounts of trips due to their higher level of consumption, when the families size increases, the shopping trip and expenditure per trip will increase too; higher income household may see time as high value and unwilling to spend time on shopping trips, this group household would have less amount of trips, but they have grea ter expenditure at each trip; household with full time job would also have less amount of trips due to their busy works, but they would also have much greater expenditure than the household without full time job at each trip.

From the conclusion, the authors indicate that “household characteristics influence shopping behavior by affecting both number of trips and expenditure” (Bawa and Ghosh, 1999). Overall, not only the household characteristics, but also the store and market characteristics might affect consumers’ shopping behaviors.

Different types of households have different shopping behaviors, family type of household, such as married with children, would have more shopping trips and greater expenditure at each trip than the nonfamily type of household due to the size of household.

           

         

Citied:

Kapil Bawa and Avijit Ghosh, “A Model of Household Grocery Shopping Behavior”, Marketing Letters , Vol. 10, No. 2 (May, 1999), pp. 149-160, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40216529