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The purpose of this paper is to help online grocery retailers determine the optimal return and refund policies for perishable grocery items. Three refund policies and two return requirements are modelled: no-refund, full-refund and partial-refund, with or without product return. We first derive the optimal refund policy under two scenarios, where either product return is or is not required for refund. We further analyse how market conditions impact the optimal policies. Lastly, we investigate when product return should be required for refund. Our results show that a more generous refund policy should be offered if the product has a higher profit margin, if an unsatisfactory product has a large negative impact on consumer utility, and if consumers have high return costs when product return is required for refund. Our results also show that it is optimal not to require the unwanted product to be returned when consumer's return cost and product return rate are above certain threshold values. This paper fills the gap in the literature on return and refund policies in an online grocery setting. The findings of this paper provide explicit guidance to online grocery businesses on how to optimally determine the return and refund policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diverting food waste from landfills is crucial to reduce emissions and meet Paris Agreement targets. Between 2014 and 2024, nine US states banned commercial waste generators—such as grocery chains—from landfilling food waste, expecting a 10 to 15% waste reduction. However, no evaluation of these bans exists. We compile a comprehensive waste dataset covering 36 US states between 1996 and 2019 to evaluate the first five implemented state-level bans. Contrary to policy-makers’ expectations, we can reject aggregate waste reductions higher than 3.2%, and we cannot reject a zero-null aggregate effect. Moreover, we cannot reject a zero-null effect for any other state except Massachusetts, which gradually achieved a 13.2% reduction. Our findings reveal the need to reassess food waste bans using Massachusetts as a benchmark for success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse 69 entries and relocations by the largest Norwegian discount variety chain Europris during the period 2016–2019, and measure how its location choices affect local grocery stores' performance. We use detailed data from a major Norwegian grocery chain, which enables us to combine local grocery stores' sales and traffic with travelling distance to new or relocated Europris stores, and a two-way fixed effects strategy. Our findings suggest that entries and relocations have significant effects and that the sign of the effect depends on the distance between the stores, creating a non-linear relationship between the effect of entry and the distance between the stores. Sufficiently close entries and relocations increase local demand since more customers are attracted to the market, but as the distance increases, the competitive effect of a new discount variety store dominates, and local grocery store sales and traffic are reduced. As we move further away, the entry effect is gradually reduced to zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iowa's bottle bill needs major reform. For years the bottle deposit system made Iowans happy while also keeping land across the state litter-free. However, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated deep cracks that formed in the system over years of neglect. With no signs of improvement, dealers and distributors alike began blatantly breaking the law without any repercussions, leaving citizens with few options for container returns. The Iowa Legislature passed a modest reform in the spring of 2022, but the changes it implemented only exacerbate the problem by allowing grocery stores to opt out of accepting returns, making these returns more burdensome. The changes have made returning containers for consumers more difficult while failing to offer real solutions to the problems faced. By borrowing ideas from other states' bottle bills, (such as increased deposit prices, expanded container eligibility, and requiring redemption by grocers with penalties included) Iowa can save the bottle bill and continue to promote the law's ultimate goal: to protect the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently people often purchase their daily needs at retail stores. Therefore, crowds might happen due to a manual queueing system. To overcome the problem, the smart system based on object detection has been conducted using several object detection methods. This study proposed YOLOv8 combined with transformer Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT-DETR) model to enhance the method performance in detecting the detail products. The intra-Class Variation method has been used to recognize the characteristics of the products such as size, color, and variant of the product. To validate the proposed model, three different datasets have been applied that is grocery dataset that displays products one by one in the training and validation process, the RPC-dataset that has many products in one image, and the D2S dataset with products that have varying lighting and stacked products. Results showed that the proposed model outperformed compared to other models, with a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 99.5% for the grocery dataset, 99.3% RPC-dataset, and 85.5% D2S dataset, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article emphasizes the role of brand strategies, as placement in regional niche strategies for manufacturers, to impact retailer–manufacturer relations in the grocery retail sector. Due to joint purchases of initially unrelated products within a shopping cart, transaction cost‐induced complementarities between those products arise. Given unique retailer data, we infer complementarities arising from a specific product to a shopping cart of products. Using a Nash‐in‐Nash framework, we are able to show that the impact on the bargaining position for the manufacturer vis‐à‐vis a retailer is substantial and helps to increase the potential of gaining a larger slice of the profit pie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online grocery shopping (OGS) has significantly risen due to accelerated retail digitization and reshaped consumer shopping behaviors over the last years. Despite this trend, the German online grocery market lags behind its international counterparts. Notably, with almost half of the German population aged over 50 and the 55–64 age group emerging as the largest user segment in e-commerce, the over-50 demographic presents an attractive yet relatively overlooked audience for the expansion of the online grocery market. However, research on OGS behavior among German over-50s is scarce. This study addresses this gap, empirically investigating OGS adoption factors within this demographic through an online survey with 179 respondents. Our findings reveal that over a third of the over-50 demographic has embraced OGS, indicating a growing receptivity for OGS among the over-50s. Notably, home delivery, product variety, convenience, and curiosity emerged as primary drivers for OGS adoption among this demographic. Surprisingly, most adopters did not increase online grocery orders since 2020 and a not inconsiderable proportion have even stopped buying groceries online again. For potential OGS adopters, regional product availability turned out as a motivator, signaling substantial growth potential and providing online grocers with strategic opportunities to target this demographic. In light of our research, we offer practical suggestions to online grocery retailers, aiming to overcome barriers and capitalize on key drivers identified in our study for sustained growth in the over-50 market segment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractScopus database between 2000 and 2023 showed that while groceries are vital in disaster/pandemic management, their roles have not been adequately addressed in the literature. In this study, we argued that privately owned groceries can complement large food storage facilities and provide effective and sustainable Public–Private Partnerships-PPP for disaster/pandemic management. We supported our argument with surveys of 254 customers and 100 grocery tenants, as well as a spatial analysis utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The results indicated that 62% of customers and 89% of grocery tenants agreed that grocery sales increased during COVID-19. Furthermore, 75% of customers agreed that groceries are vital during disaster/pandemic, and 81.8% of grocery tenants agreed that their current infrastructure allows their stores to become emergency food depots. Through GIS analysis, we found that groceries are clustered around population centers, and 69% of customers have groceries within a 5–10-minute walking distance. Our results demonstrated that groceries can be crucial in disaster management. The study aligns with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 and UN-SDG goals 11 and 17. The findings could be utilized by organizations working in the field of disaster/pandemic management. The research fills a gap in the literature and offers new insights into the potential of using privately owned groceries in disaster/pandemic management. It highlights the need for further consideration of these important community resources.

There is considerable controversy as to whether a healthy diet is affordable given recent inflation. In order to determine whether a healthy, climate-friendly sustainable diet can be obtained within the allotments of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), we created and purchased 26 weeks of meal plans designed to meet the EAT-Lancet sustainability guidelines and > 90% of the RDAs for 23 macro/micronutrients for households with at least 2 adults and 1–3 children. We compared the food quantities and cost of a healthy sustainable diet purchased in Los Angeles, 2023, to the Thrifty Food Plan, 2021. We compared the volume of food and cost of basic groceries to those recommended in the Thrifty Food Plan, 2021. The costs of the sustainable diet fell within the 2023 SNAP allotments as long as the average calories required per person did not exceed 2000. The volume of fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds were considerably higher for the sustainable diet compared to the Thrifty Food Plan. Given that calorie needs are the determinants of food quantity and costs, the USDA may consider offering supplemental coverage for individuals with higher calorie needs to make healthy eating affordable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanoid robots can serve as in‐store communication medium, providing functional as well as hedonic value. Previous studies have demonstrated their proficiency in providing functional value, such as guiding customers, advertising products, or carrying groceries. However, in a retailing context, engaging customers often requires more than meeting their basic functional needs. This study is the first to examine the potential of humanoid service robots (HSRs) in providing hedonic value as well, comparing their performance to that of more traditional in‐store media in entertaining customers. Based on media richness effectiveness theory, the role of robot voice is also investigated. An experimental field study was performed administering a fun quiz to passers‐by at an airport store considering three conditions (via tablet, robot with voice, or robot without voice). The results show that the quiz via a humanoid robot (as compared to via a tablet kiosk) provides customers more functional and hedonic value. While functional value favorably affects loyalty intentions mainly via enhanced store image, hedonic value has a direct and indirect effect mainly via store attitude. Adding voice to the HSR does not seem to provide significant added value. Data on actual purchase behavior also hint at superiority of the robot over a traditional tablet kiosk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Food retailers can be reluctant to initiate healthy food retail activities in the face of a complex set of interrelated drivers that impact the retail environment. The Systems Thinking Approach for Retail Transformation (START) is a determinants framework created using qualitative systems modelling to guide healthy food retail interventions in community-based, health-promoting settings. We aimed to test the applicability of the START map to a suite of distinct healthy food marketing and promotion activities that formed an intervention in a grocery setting in regional Victoria, Australia. Methods: A secondary analysis was undertaken of 16 previously completed semi-structured interviews with independent grocery retailers and stakeholders. Interviews were deductively coded against the existing START framework, whilst allowing for new grocery-setting specific factors to be identified. New factors and relationships were used to build causal loop diagrams and extend the original START systems map using Vensim. Results: A version of the START map including aspects relevant to the grocery setting was developed ("START-G"). In both health-promoting and grocery settings, it was important for retailers to 'Get Started' with healthy food retail interventions that were supported by a proof-of-concept and 'Focus on the customer' response (with grocery-settings focused on monitoring sales data). New factors and relationships described perceived difficulties associated with disrupting a grocery-setting 'Supply-side status quo' that promotes less healthy food and beverage options. Yet, most grocery retailers discussed relationships that highlighted the potential for 'Healthy food as innovation' and 'Supporting cultural change through corporate social responsibility and leadership'. Conclusions: Several differences were found when implementing healthy food retail in grocery compared to health promotion settings. The START-G map offers preliminary guidance for identifying and addressing commercial interests in grocery settings that currently promote less healthy foods and beverages, including by starting to address business outcomes and supplier relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent technological advancements have catalysed significant transformations in various aspects of human life, notably in the realm of electronic commerce. Among these changes, the emergence of online platforms for purchasing groceries, commonly referred to as E-grocery, has garnered considerable attention, particularly in the post-pandemic era. Within this landscape, Quick Commerce (q-commerce) has emerged as a prominent model, facilitating the on-demand delivery of groceries. This study aims to investigate the influence of key factors such as e-service quality, perceived ease of use, and electronic Word-of-Mouth (e-WoM) on consumers' decision-making processes regarding online grocery purchases, specifically through the Astro quick commerce application, with e-trust serving as a mediator. Utilizing Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) techniques and data collected from 125 respondents, the analysis reveals that both e-service quality and e-WoM positively impact consumer e-trust. Moreover, these factors, in conjunction with e-trust itself, significantly influence consumers' decisions to make purchases. To foster positive e-WoM for the Astro platform, the study suggests improving compensation services, prioritizing application usability, and closely monitoring all Astro-related information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's era, internet has become one of the most popular platforms to shop online including grocery products. Online grocery shopping (OGS) has been considered relatively new but a promising sector of e-commerce in India. Several scholars have investigated the factors affecting the customer intention to buy grocery products online in different research contexts, however, there is no consensus in the literature on determinants of OGS. This article aims to explore the factors, such as convenience, trust, website design and security, that influence customer satisfaction in OGS. A survey was developed, and collected responses were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. The findings suggest that one of the major determinants of customer satisfaction while buying groceries online is website user-friendliness and the information provided about the grocery items. Furthermore, convenience and payment security also have a very significant positive impact on customer satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tourism & Rural Development Studies / Turisztikai és Vidékfejlesztési Tanulmányok is the property of CampInvest Kft. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Management & Agribusiness / Jurnal Manajemen & Agribisnis is the property of IPB University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay brings the discourse of "weak theory" to bear on Lyn Hejinian's feminist experimental poem of the 1980s, My Life. It argues that the eating matters of My Life —the poem's steady references to eating, cooking, grocery shopping, dieting, and so forth—open up a fresh account of the poem's feminist and cultural historicity. Bracketing accustomed readings of the poem as exemplary of poetic postmodernism or as what Hejinian calls an "open text," the essay situates My Life instead in the 1970s-80s emergence of anorexia as both a popular and a theoretical keyword. It revalues the range of eating matters that shape the feminist poetics of Hejinian's best-known work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Regarding the retail internal supply chain (SC), both retailers and research are currently focused on reactive food waste reduction options in stores (e.g. discounting or donations). These options reduce waste after a surplus has emerged but do not prevent an emerging surplus in the first place. This paper aims to reveal how retailers can proactively prevent waste along the SC and why the options identified are impactful but, at the same time, often complex to implement. Design/methodology/approach: The authors follow an exploratory approach for a nascent topic to obtain insights into measures taken in practice. Interviews with experts from retail build the main data source. Findings: The authors identify and analyze 21 inbound, warehousing, distribution and store-related options applied in grocery retail. Despite the expected high overall impact on waste, prevention measures in inbound logistics and distribution and warehousing have not been intensively applied to date. Practical implications: The authors provide a structured approach to mitigate waste within retailers' operations and categorize the types of barriers that need to be addressed. Originality/value: This research provides a better understanding of prevention options in retail operations, which has not yet been empirically explored. Furthermore, this study conceptualizes prevention and reduction options and reveals implementation patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how regulatory changes influence the market dynamics underlying business location decisions by investigating how a 2019 law introducing full-strength beer into grocery and convenience stores in the US state of Colorado impacted craft brewers a year after implementation. A state-wide survey reveals that the new channels brought limited change to how craft breweries sell beer. Access to grocery stores advantages larger craft breweries, while smaller breweries face significant logistical barriers. Analysis of mobile phone geolocation data reveals a modest reduction in visitation to liquor stores. Results suggest that the policy change will not impair Colorado's ability to draw craft beer investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product recognition on grocery shelf images is a compelling task of object detection because of the similarity between products, the presence of the different scale of product sizes, and the high number of classes, in addition to constantly renewed packaging and added new products' difficulty in data collection. The use of conventional methods alone is not enough to solve a number of retail problems such as planogram compliance, stock tracking on shelves, and customer support. The purpose of this study is to achieve significant results using the suggested multi-stage end-to-end process, including product detection, product classification, and refinement. The comparison of different methods is provided by a traditional computer vision approach, Aggregate Channel Features (ACF) and Single-Shot Detectors (SSD) are used in the product detection stage, and Speed-up Robust Features (SURF), Binary Robust Invariant Scalable Key points (BRISK), Oriented Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST), Rotated Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features (BRIEF) (ORB), and hybrids of these methods are used in the product classification stage. The experimental results used the entire Grocery Products dataset and its different subsets with a different number of products and images. The best performance was achieved with the use of SSD in the product detection stage and the hybrid use of SURF, BRISK, and ORB in the product classification stage, respectively. Additionally, the proposed approach performed comparably or better than existing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eighteenth-century consumption is often characterised in terms of an expanding world of goods, one that reflected an increasingly complex web of global trading links and cultural associations. Some have seen a growing role for empire in shaping the provision of goods and the consciousness of consumers, especially in terms of groceries and textiles; others have argued that Europe, especially Italy and France, was predominant in the minds of retailers and their customers. In this article, I build on these studies by exploring the placenames with which a wide range of groceries and textiles were labelled in stock lists, newspaper advertisements and receipted bills. My concern is to examine the varied meanings that these placenames carried for retailers and consumers: sometimes indicating provenance, but often overlaying this with messages about the material qualities of the products. Rather than mapping actual patterns of supply, therefore, the analysis opens up the mental geographies that helped shopkeepers and consumers to comprehend the world of goods available to them. In doing so, it provides important insights into England's changing position in the eighteenth-century world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A phenomenon with which planners and clients must contend has been the enactment of laws that are designed to change, expire, or self-destruct due merely to the passage of time. Most notably this has occurred with gift and estate tax exemption levels. An ever-changing landscape, particularly where dramatic changes are built-in by legislative design, introduces added complexity, but sometimes also opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The backroom of retail stores has structural differences when compared with other warehouses and distribution centres, which are more traditionally studied in the literature. This paper presents a mathematical optimisation approach for an unequal area facility layout problem, applied in designing the backroom layout in grocery retail. A set of rectangular facilities (backroom departments) with given area requirements has to be placed, without overlapping, on a limited floor space (backroom area), which can have a regular or an irregular shape. The objective is to find the location and format of the storage departments, such that the walking distances in the store by store employees are minimised. The proposed approach is tested in a European grocery retailer. In the computational experiments, several real store layouts are compared with the ones suggested by the proposed model. The decrease in the walking distances is, on average, 30 percent. In order to understand what the current designers' strategy is, a set of scenarios was created and compared with the real layouts. Each scenario ignores a characteristic of the problem. The goal is to understand what aspect designers are currently discarding. The findings indicate that, currently, designers neglect the different replenishment frequencies of storage departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poem "So-So Grocery" by Michael Spence is presented. First Line: The address—5050 Downman Road— Last Line: And pressed my lips tight as it scoured my tongue.

Backrooms are an important echelon of the retail supply chain. However, research focus has been mostly targeted to optimise both distribution centres and stores' sales area. In this paper, we propose two mathematical programming formulations to solve the grocery backroom sizing problem. This problem consists of determining the dimension of each storage department in the backroom area to optimise its overall efficiency. The first formulation is a bottom-up approach that aims to reduce the backroom life-cycle costs by determining the optimum floor space and storage height for each department. The second is a top-down approach based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which determines the efficient level of storage floor space for each backroom department, based on a comparison with the benchmarks observed among existing stores. Each approach has distinct characteristics that turn the models suitable for different retail contexts. We also describe the application of the proposed approaches to a case study of a European retailer. The application of this methodology in the design process demonstrated substantial potential for space savings (6% for the bottom-up model and 16% for the top-down model). This space reduction should either allow higher revenues in the sales area and/or lower backroom-related costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, myriad universities have sought measures to alleviate the burden of nutrition inse­curity among undergraduate in order to improve student health and academic success, as the preva­lence of nutrition insecurity on college campuses has gained attention from researchers. At Missouri Southern State University (MSSU), faculty launched the Lion Co-op Center for Nutrition Security (LCCNS) in 2018, which focused on research and included a free food and personal hygiene pantry that all students, staff, and faculty were eligible to use. In 2020, the LCCNS piloted the Groceries to Graduate (G2G) scholarship program, which provides advanced undergraduate students (those who have earned 60+ credit hours) in good standing and with finan­cial need with scholarship tokens that can be used as currency at the Webb City Farmers Market, located three miles north of campus. The objective of this program was to increase low-income under­graduate access to fresh produce and reduce their financial burden of purchasing high quality food, therefore improving academic outcomes. This reflective essay examines the preliminary findings we obtained about the first two years of the schol­arship program. It assesses the methods of com­municating with students about the scholarship program, token usage, availability of fresh produce, and student academic success. The initial findings suggest that while the model needs improvement, the scholarships are meeting student needs for access to nutritional food. This market-based solu­tion gives students currency (tokens) so that they can buy directly from local merchants, a model that with some revision may provide a workable model for small universities to address nutritional insecu­rity among students.

Copyright of Journal of Business & SMEs is the property of ECORFAN-Mexico S.C. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Carrying items of substantial weight and value in one's arms while traversing challenging terrain is a common task that requires considerable care. Carrying valuable (e.g., child) or variable (e.g., water) items, compared to stable ones (e.g., groceries) demands increased coordination, and is likely to lead to slower comfortable walking speed (CWS) and altered gait mechanics, especially on difficult terrain. How are gait parameters altered by carrying items of substantial weight and varying value and dynamics across more and less demanding terrain? In two experiments, participants carried their child, an equally weighted sack of groceries, or an open bucket of water in the same manner across level floor and across uneven stairs of varying heights with gaps between them. Kinematics were assessed for both terrains; kinetics were measured for one step up and one step down on stairs. Mixed models ANOVAs with repeated measures revealed that CWS on uneven stairs was approximately 65 % of CWS for level floor, regardless of the item carried. Step-to-step coefficients of variation for step length and CWS were also greater. Water was carried most slowly, with shorter steps on level floor and reduced accelerations on uneven stairs. CWS with children and groceries did not differ. Carrying items of weight and worth with varying dynamics across more and less challenging terrain illustrates the ecological complexity of walking. Terrain requiring greater flexibility, strength, and coordination reduced CWS substantially, a complexity-speed tradeoff. More variable, difficult to control items altered CWS and other gait patterns regardless of terrain difficulty, suggesting terrain and item dynamics contributed independently to gait adjustments. More valuable items were not carried more slowly than less valuable ones. Carrying tasks deserve greater attention in research and clinical assessment. • Gait changes while carrying valuable items across challenging terrain is understudied. • Loads carried slower with greater variability on uneven stairs than on level floor. • Water carried slower with more variability than child or groceries on both terrains. • More valuable items were not carried more slowly than less valuable ones. • Terrain and kind of load carried contribute independently to gait changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, myriad universities have sought measures to alleviate the burden of nutrition insecurity among undergraduate in order to improve student health and academic success, as the prevalence of nutrition insecurity on college campuses has gained attention from researchers. At Missouri Southern State University (MSSU), faculty launched the Lion Co-op Center for Nutrition Security (LCCNS) in 2018, which focused on research and included a free food and personal hygiene pantry that all students, staff, and faculty were eligible to use. In 2020, the LCCNS piloted the Groceries to Graduate (G2G) scholarship program, which provides advanced undergraduate students (those who have earned 60+ credit hours) in good standing and with financial need with scholarship tokens that can be used as currency at the Webb City Farmers Market, located three miles north of campus. The objective of this program was to increase low-income undergraduate access to fresh produce and reduce their financial burden of purchasing high quality food, therefore improving academic outcomes. This reflective essay examines the preliminary findings we obtained about the first two years of the scholarship program. It assesses the methods of communicating with students about the scholarship program, token usage, availability of fresh produce, and student academic success. The initial findings suggest that while the model needs improvement, the scholarships are meeting student needs for access to nutritional food. This market-based solution gives students currency (tokens) so that they can buy directly from local merchants, a model that with some revision may provide a workable model for small universities to address nutritional insecurity among students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Purpose of the study is to comprehend both the demographic aspects and the elements that affect consumers' decisions to shop for groceries online. The Navi Mumbai region served as the site of the research. Exploratory research techniques are used. An online survey was used to collect data. Data on customer demographics, such as gender, age, and monthly income, as well as buying habits and websites visited, was gathered using a standardized questionnaire. In Navi Mumbai City, 117 online grocery shoppers were included in the sample. A convenient sampling method is used. Finding reveals that an innovation in digital platforms in grocery shopping provides an array of tailored services. Today’s customers are adopted new digital platforms for grocery shopping. Technology plays a very important role in retail digital platforms and impacts more on customer perception. Consumer learning and social acceptance is very important in online grocery selling. This study discovered that consumer learning and societal acceptance both have an impact on how appealing grocery shopping is to consumers and, as a result, how likely they are to embrace this new shopping strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Returning home from the grocery store with a car full of groceries requires decisions about how many bags to carry when. If the decisions exemplify procrastination, people should carry more bags per trip in late trips than in early trips (putting the hard work off until later), but if the decisions exemplify the recently discovered phenomenon of pre-crastination (Rosenbaum et al. in Psychol Sci 25: 1487–1496, 2014), people should carry more bags per trip in early trips than in late trips (doing the hard work early). To distinguish between these possibilities, we asked university students to carry 5 or 11 dodgeballs from one bin to another 4, 8, 12, or 16 feet away in as many trips as they wished. A random half of the subjects did the tasks with an additional requirement to memorize and then recall 7 digits after carrying all the balls from the home to the target bin. Consistent with pre-crastination, participants carried the most balls per trip in early trips, and consistent with the hypothesis that pre-crastination relates to memory load, the number of balls carried per trip was affected by the presence of a memory load. The results add to the growing evidence for the generality of pre-crastination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diet-related illness in the U.S. has risen to crisis levels, with today's parents projected--for the first time--to enjoy longer lives than their children. Policymakers have responded with a range of novel proposals, many revolving around the assumption that increasing the relative price of unhealthful foods via taxes on soda, fat, sugar or caloric density will encourage more healthful eating. Yet there is little evidence that diet-targeted price interventions have had a meaningful impact on health outcomes. The reason for this, I argue, is both expected and largely overlooked in the academic and policy literatures: consumers have been motivated by price interventions to eat differently, but differently isn't necessarily better. Price interventions created and crafted solely on the basis of the nutritional value of the targeted dietary item(s) are vulnerable to health-neutral substitution effects, wherein a price intervention motivates consumers to substitute items of similar dietary value--candy or beer for soda, for example--leading to little net change in overall dietary quality. This Article proposes a novel food tax strategy, one that focuses on substitution effects. Instead of targeting foods with the least or most nutritional value, legislators and other policymakers should direct taxes to foods with the least or most relatively healthful substitutes. As proof of concept, this Article introduces a specific substitution-based food tax proposal, supported with empirical results from an original randomized controlled trial: food taxes should seek to motivate substitution between grocery food and the relatively less healthful option of restaurant food. The health impact of such a shift will likely exceed that of a direct tax on soda, fat, sugar or calories given the high cross-elasticity of demand for restaurant food and its significant health inferiority. And because this shift may be accomplished by subsidizing groceries, by lowering taxes on groceries or by increasing taxes on restaurants, it presents a more politically flexible intervention than traditional consumer-side food taxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disasters often create inequitable consequences along racial and socioeconomic lines, but a pandemic is distinctive in that communities must navigate the ongoing hazards of infection exposure. We examine this for accessing essential needs, specifically groceries. We propose three strategies for mitigating risk when accessing groceries: visit grocery stores less often; prioritize generalist grocery stores; seek out stores whose clientele have lower infection rates. The study uses a unique combination of data to examine racial and socioeconomic inequities in the ability to employ these strategies in the census block groups of greater Boston, MA in April 2020, including cellphone-generated GPS records to observe store visits, a resident survey, localized infection rates, and demographic and infrastructural characteristics. We also present an original quantification of the amount of infection risk exposure when visiting grocery stores using visits, volume of visitors at each store, and infection rates of those visitors' communities. Each of the three strategies for mitigating exposure were employed in Boston, though differentially by community. Communities with more Black and Latinx residents and lower income made relatively more grocery store visits. This was best explained by differential use of grocery delivery services. Exposure and exposure per visit were higher in communities with more Black and Latinx residents and higher infection rates even when accounting for strategies that diminish exposure. The findings highlight two forms of inequities: using wealth to transfer risk to others through grocery deliveries; and behavioral segregation by race that makes it difficult for marginalized communities to avoid hazards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The performance of batch picking (BP) and batch-synchronized zone picking (BSZP) are compared with learning effects. • The heuristic methods, i.e. genetic algorithms, are proposed to solve BP and BSZP strategies. • With learning effects, although BSZP needs to travel longer than BP , it needs a shorter search time than BP. • If pickers' working days are long enough, the search time of BP becomes closer to BSZP , leading BP to outperform BSZP. • Which strategy outperforms mainly depends on learning rates, storage assignments, and pickers' working days. The performance of two common picking strategies, batch picking (BP) and batch-synchronized zone picking (BSZP), are compared by considering pickers' learning effects in online-to-offline (O2O) groceries. As we know from previous research, one major advantage of BSZP is that pickers can be more familiar with the item locations because each picker works in a relatively smaller picking area. However, few papers have formulated a quantitative method to verify this advantage. To address this, we use pickers' learning effects to quantify their familiarity with the item locations, and then compare the picking efficiency in BP and BSZP with learning effects. The optimization models of BP and BSZP are formulated to minimize the total service time, and heuristic methods are proposed to solve these models. The case study is implemented under three order types and three storage assignment policies, i.e. Random, ABC-1, and ABC-2. The results of the study indicate that with learning effects, although BSZP needs a longer travel time than BP , it requires a shorter search time. Which strategy, BP or BSZP , is more efficient mainly depends on the learning rates, storage assignment policies, and pickers' working days. When the storage assignments are Random and ABC-1 , a smaller learning rate can lead BSZP to perform better than BP. When the storage assignment is ABC-2, BSZP performs better than BP. When pickers' working days are long enough, the learning effect is weakened, and BP outperforms. Awareness of the learning effects is required to choose a better picking strategy, evaluate more accurate picking efficiency and hire an appropriate number of pickers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sudden spread of COVID-19 has turned human life upside down. The WHO (World Health Organization) declared COVID as a pandemic in March 2020. Soon the government imposed many restrictions and lockdowns across the nation, leading to the shutting down of shops & industries. The lockdown resulted in the panic of buying among consumers. During this phase, people explored online platforms for buying groceries as they were many restrictions and the fear of getting COVID. This research paper aims to find out how COVID-19 is changing the e-grocery buying behavior of people living in Mumbai city. The technique used to evaluate the study is the standard deviation and percentage method. The study discloses that there is a remarkable shift in the E-grocery buying behavior of consumers in Mumbai city. The respondents start buying groceries more during COVID as they consider online platforms safer and time-saving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the temporary closure of many food-away-from-home establishments, consumer expenditure on groceries during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased. While grocery shopping is an essential activity, not much is known about the dynamic relationship of the COVID-19 pandemic to the behavior of grocery shoppers. Hence the research study focuses on consumer behavior towards groceries house hold products through digital marketing platform in the lockdown period with special reference to Chennai city. In this context the researcher has made a structured questionnaire and collected 100 respondents from research area and analyzed weighted average, weighted average rank, standard deviation and anova. The research study mainly attempts to know the customer behavior during the pandemic due to full lock down and there will be drastically changes on online shopping determined by the present researcher the changes will create competitive benefits for emerging firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a grocery store, product supply management is critical to its employee's ability to operate productively. To find the right time for updating the item in terms of design/replenishment, real-time data on item availability are required. As a result, the item is consistently accessible on the rack when the client requires it. This study focuses on product display management at a grocery store to determine a particular product and its quantity on the shelves. Deep Learning (DL) is used to determine and identify every item and the store's supervisor compares all identified items with a preconfigured item planning that was done by him earlier. The approach is made in II-phases. Product detection, followed by product recognition. For product detection, we have used You Only Look Once Version 5 (YOLOV5), and for product recognition, we have used both the shape and size features along with the color feature to reduce the false product detection. Experimental results were carried out using the SKU-110 K data set. The analyses show that the proposed approach has improved accuracy, precision, and recall. For product recognition, the inclusion of color feature enables the reduction of error date. It is helpful to distinguish between identical logo which has different colors. We can achieve the accuracy percentage for feature level as 75 and score level as 81. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to introduce a new tool—the Open Science Online Grocery—for studying the effects of the choice context on purchasing decisions. We first review the features of the tool: a mock online grocery store containing over 11,000 products wherein researchers can modify the choice context (e.g., positioning, labeling, suggestions) and observe resulting choice. Then, we present three studies illustrating how the tool can help assess how changes to labeling, ordering, and positioning affect choice. We find that both ordering and positioning have significant effects on choice while labeling does not. These findings largely align with existing research in field and laboratory settings. We hope this tool proves useful to researchers wanting to test choice context modifications in a relatively affordable and efficient manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assess the performance of third‐party sellers relative to Amazon, this study estimates the effect of different sales strategies on Amazon's reported best sellers rank (BSR) of ground coffee in the USA and Canada and red wine in the United Kingdom using a fixed‐effects model. The products are either 'sold and shipped by Amazon' (Amazon), 'sold by the third‐party seller and fulfilled by Amazon' (FBA), or 'sold and fulfilled by a third‐party merchant' (FBM). For each of the grocery products and in all empirical specifications, FBM increases the BSR, reducing the relative sales performance of the product in its category. Specifically, FBM increases the BSR of grocery products by 60% relative to Amazon whereas the effect of FBA on BSR is mostly indistinguishable from the effect of Amazon on BSR. These results suggest that Amazon and FBA mostly perform equivalently, but both sales strategies outperform FBM. However, whether the relatively poor performance of the third‐party (FBM) shippers and sellers is due to unfair competition by Amazon remains an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Omnichannel (OC) logistics is undergoing a significant transformation in grocery retail. To shed light on this important but underresearched phenomenon, this study aims to investigate how grocery retailers transform and why some are more successful in transforming OC logistics. Design/methodology/approach: Applying dynamic capabilities as a theoretical lens, a multiple case study was conducted with three grocery retailers at different stages of their transformation. Findings: Six microfoundations of dynamic capabilities were identified as critical for enabling OC transformation. The study highlights important differences in dynamic capabilities, which can be attributed to investment decision-making, governance and creating co-specialization. Finally, the authors propose seven propositions for contextualization of dynamic capabilities for OC transformation in grocery retail. Originality/value: This study is original by contextualizing microfoundations in grocery OC retailing. The study contributes to theory and practice by showing the value of dynamic capabilities, stressing the important interrelation among a retailer's governance structure, leadership and capability to make investment decisions, increase logistics coordination and co-specialize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efforts of regulators and food industry actors to achieve ambitious European sustainability objectives should not only be based on, but also supported by, consumers' behavior, since customers' demand has the ability to determine changes in the whole food system. This paper's systemic approach to customers' sustainable food-related habits and opinions during purchase, consumption and waste management offers a comprehensive view of their decision criteria, their motivations and their preferred incentives. Researching the Romanian consumer's sustainable habits yields some results which confirm findings of previous studies, including customers' distrust of sustainable labels and ecological products being considered too expensive. Meanwhile, other results offer novel insights on the matter, such as distrust in the European Union food policy and the high importance of proximity both for retailers and for recycling facilities. Four customer profiles with different interests and behaviors were identified: the Principled, adopting many sustainable behaviors out of principle, despite their low level of food expenditures; the Wannabes, adopting some fashionable sustainable habits; and the Privileged and the Sceptics, adopting very few sustainable habits, the first to ensure their social and economic status and the second to save some money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to gain insights and explicate how blockchain technology enables trust and traceability building from a real business use case. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted a qualitative case study of a leading global French grocery retail firm that has started to integrate blockchain into their supply chain and products. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and secondary data sources. Findings: This paper developed a conceptual framework in unboxing the mechanism by which blockchain enables trust and explicating how information flows in a blockchain-based system compared to a traditional one in a real business application scenario through three main elements, namely, system architecture, data recovery and communication. Originality/value: Given the upside potential of emerging technologies such as blockchain coupled with the current increasing demand for business use cases, the paper is timely in integrating the business and technological aspects of trust in formulating a firm-level blockchain strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the shopping motivations behind market baskets has significant commercial value for the grocery retail industry. The analysis of shopping transactions demands techniques that can cope with the volume and dimensionality of grocery transactional data while delivering interpretable outcomes. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) allows processing grocery transactions and the discovering of customer behaviours. Interpretations of topic models typically exploit individual samples overlooking the uncertainty of single topics. Moreover, training LDA multiple times show topics with large uncertainty, that is, topics (dis)appear in some but not all posterior samples, concurring with various authors in the field. In response, we introduce a clustering methodology that post‐processes posterior LDA draws to summarise topic distributions represented as recurrent topics. Our approach identifies clusters of topics that belong to different samples and provides associated measures of uncertainty for each group. Our proposed methodology allows the identification of an unconstrained number of customer behaviours presented as recurrent topics. We also establish a more holistic framework for model evaluation, which assesses topic models based not only on their predictive likelihood but also on quality aspects such as coherence and distinctiveness of single topics and credibility of a set of topics. Using the outcomes of a tailored survey, we set thresholds that aid in interpreting quality aspects in grocery retail data. We demonstrate that selecting recurrent topics not only improves predictive likelihood but also outperforms interpretability and credibility. We illustrate our methods with an example from a large British supermarket chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Given the growing prominence of voice-activated artificial intelligent devices (VAIs) as the strategic market-facing technology for grocery purchases, this article aims to bring together theories on anthropomorphism, trust, emotional attachment, self-connection and self-disclosure in one conceptual framework establishing that consumer–VAI relationship has significant implications for grocery purchase satisfaction and intention to repurchase using VAIs. Design/methodology/approach: The study tested seven hypotheses through a survey-based approach comprising of two studies. Findings: The study empirically supports VAI anthropomorphism and trust in VAIs as predictors of consumer–VAI emotional attachment and establishes the moderating role of consumer self-disclosure. Consumer–VAI self-connection resulting from emotional attachment results in grocery purchase satisfaction and intention to repurchase using VAIs. Research limitations/implications: The article offers a novel perspective on consumer–VAI relationships and the use of VAIs for grocery purchases. It establishes an agentic role of consumers when ordering groceries using VAIs, creating a deeper understanding of how consumer–VAI emotional attachment results in extensions of consumers' self-identity, resulting in purchase satisfaction and repurchase intention using VAIs. Practical implications: Establishing a consumer–VAI relationship, the article brings out the strategic importance of VAIs for marketers in grocery purchases and repurchases, which can be extended to other purchases. Originality/value: The article offers a new perspective on establishing VAIs as strategically important market-facing devices by examining consumer relationships with VAIs and offering valuable insights on how consumer emotional attachment with VAIs results in satisfaction and intention to repurchase using VAIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern hydroponic substrates have contributed significantly to the popularity and progress of hydroponic cultivations worldwide, nevertheless, their development, transportation, and disposal often come at a significant environmental cost. Here we investigate the feasibility of partial to total replacement of conventional organic growing media constituents, such as cocodust (C), in a 20% perlite (P) and 80% cocodust substrate (hereafter control 8C), with compost from locally sourced grocery waste (W). For this purpose, four treatment mixtures were developed (6C:2W, 4C:4W, 2C:6W, 8W), with the grocery waste-compost fraction ranging from 20 to 80%, respectively (perlite constant at 20%). The new substrates were tested on hydroponic lettuce (Lactuca sativa var. Tanius) cultivation. During the 35-day experiment, lettuce physiology was evaluated using chlorophyll concentration [SPAD], chlorophyll fluorescence [Fv/Fm], number of leaves, and plant growth index. At harvest, the plant yield was evaluated using leaf area [cm2], leaf fresh and dry weight [g], as well as leaf firmness [g]. Results show that substrates with compost led to superior physiology and yield characteristics, with 8W inducing a significant increase in leaf area, chlorophyll concentration, dry weight, and firmness, by 11.6%, 5.4%, 19.8% and 12.8%, respectively, compared to the control treatment 8C. Results indicate that grocery waste-based compost is an excellent sustainable alternative for the soilless cultivation of lettuce. After its use in hydroponic cultivation, substrate material is safe to dispose of or be used as a soil amendment, thus contributing to a circular agro-food economy model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]