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Much research focuses on the “power” side of “pester power” with the assumption being that all requests are unwanted. Focusing on children aged under approximately 14 years old, and using recordings of 89 shopping trips, this paper uses the Eyberg Child Behaviour Inventory (new to the marketing literature) to investigate the “pester” aspect further and finds that, by and large, most trips are conducted without extreme child behaviours being exhibited. A third of children exhibit whining, and the remainder of scale items have low incidence of occurrence. These behaviours are also not found to be related to product requests. Roughly eighty percent of children made a request, and a fifth of these requests were granted. Parents do overall exercise power as gatekeepers for the food their children eat and do appear to exercise this power in-store in addition to regulating their disruptive behaviour. Future research needs to consider the wider opportunities children have to influence their parents and their influence in other retail contexts outside grocery shopping. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Children influence up to a fifth of all household purchase decisions, yet little is known about how this influence is brought to bear. This research looks at the primary householder purchase context of grocery shopping and establishes the incidence of children accompanying adult shoppers. It identifies the effect of their presence on the spend, time taken to complete the trip and the route taken in-store. More than 33,000 observations are analysed, using exit interviews and structured observation of the in-store location of shoppers across two Australian states and four grocery retail outlets Refuting the commonly held assertion that taking children shopping makes you spend more, accompanied shoppers do not spend more than unaccompanied shoppers, but rather shop 15% faster, tending to avoid busy areas in-store We establish that, on average, 17% of grocery store shoppers are accompanied by children. Children are seen to accompany adults on both small and larger spend grocery shopping trips. Men, who are known to grocery shop less frequently than women, are found to have a lower incidence of being accompanied by a child when they do shop. This has implications for store layout and services offered. Products for children and parents need to be placed in areas where parents are more comfortable (that is, less busy areas), but also merchandised in ways that make it easy for parents to shop at their faster pace. The balance of these two needs is a direction for future research. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This research confirms empirical patterns about in-store behaviors based on a large number of shops and store visits, specifically 654,000 transactions in 40 supermarkets, hypermarkets, convenience and specialty stores in the USA, UK, China, and Australia. Integrating new data with past findings highlights that: (i) many shopping trips are short; (ii) shoppers typically only cover a small proportion of the store on any trip, and (iii) the heterogeneity of key behavioral measures (store coverage, number of items bought, and trip length) is generalizable across countries, most store formats, and store size. These patterns can help retailers and manufacturers benchmark and predict behavior and provide a base for further theoretical developments.