SOME SOCIO-ECONOMIC QUESTIONS RELATED TO AUTOMATIC SUPERMARKET CHECKOUT OPERATIONS

Raises a series of questions relative to the "total environment" in which the automated checkout will operate.Marketing,

RETAIL FOOD STORE EMPLOYEE INFLUENCE ON CUSTOMER SHOPPING BEHAVIOR

Retail food store employees presumably improve the level of satisfaction customers realize during a shopping trip. A review of the literature revealed few significant contributions supporting or refuting this contention. A telephone survey of 505 households in Fort Collins, CO during the Fall of 1988 was conducted to generate information on retail food store employees helpfulness. The findings revealed little explicit impact of helpfulness. Statistical analysis determined a number of relationships between dollars spent in a store and the perceived level of employee helpfulness. Retail food stores were not selected, patronized nor avoided based exclusively nor extensively on perceptions of employee helpfulness. On the other hand, employees were considered necessary for an enjoyable shopping trip. Employees are neither change agents in retail food stores nor are they apparently significant stress inducers or inhibitors compared to the potential stress realized by an inconvenient location, high prices or a poor variety of products. It is recommended that employees be more closely associated with obvious service strategies, and that services be made more obvious and predominant in the promotion and advertising of the retail food store.Consumer/Household Economics, Labor and Human Capital,

ROLE OF THE FOOD DISTRIBUTION INDUSTRY IN CURRENT AND LONG RUN RESEARCH EFFORTS

Marketing,

WHO RENTS AMERICA? OWNERS, TENANTS, AND TAXES

The American bias that privileges owners over tenants has its roots in early US history, in the colonial practices of limiting suffrage to property owners, and in the formation of a Constitution that protected the propertied minority from the propertyless majority. While the property test for suffrage eventually disappeared, the property bias persists, just as other barriers of gender, national origin, poverty, religion and race remain pervasive in our society. The impacts of this bias are felt not only by tenants but also by their landlords and is exercised through community organizations dominated by owners as well as common practices of zoning and tax policy. Three recent property tax bills of the New Jersey legislature illuminate the tenuous status of renters in tax policy. Even the most cursory review of recent survey data reveals the degree to which the stigma of rentership is inappropriate. This paper argues that America's renters are its owners too, and planners should foster policies that enforce greater equity among renters and owners.Right of property--Economic aspects--United States, Landlord and tenant--United States, Real property tax--United States, Rental housing--United States, Land Economics/Use,

IMPROVED FOOD SERVICE MARKETING STRATEGIES REFLECTING CHANGING CONSUMER VALUES

Consumer/Household Economics, Marketing,

SUPERMARKET CUSTOMER OBSERVATION AND ELECTRONIC DATA ANALYSIS WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR THE MARKETING PLAN

This report is based on research initiated to determine the potential role of observation methodology in market plan development. This report is based on 100 observations conduced in a supermarket dairy department. The findings have implications for market planning, merchandising and communication strategies. As a pilot project, the results are not based entirely on randomly selected customers. This reports represents efforts to apply and refine the observation technique and not necessarily to convey results that can be projected to all shoppers in a supermarket. Further work is being done to accomplish random observations.Consumer/Household Economics, Marketing,

A universal model for mobility and migration patterns

Introduced in its contemporary form by George Kingsley Zipf in 1946, but with roots that go back to the work of Gaspard Monge in the 18th century, the gravity law is the prevailing framework to predict population movement, cargo shipping volume, inter-city phone calls, as well as bilateral trade flows between nations. Despite its widespread use, it relies on adjustable parameters that vary from region to region and suffers from known analytic inconsistencies. Here we introduce a stochastic process capturing local mobility decisions that helps us analytically derive commuting and mobility fluxes that require as input only information on the population distribution. The resulting radiation model predicts mobility patterns in good agreement with mobility and transport patterns observed in a wide range of phenomena, from long-term migration patterns to communication volume between different regions. Given its parameter-free nature, the model can be applied in areas where we lack previous mobility measurements, significantly improving the predictive accuracy of most of phenomena affected by mobility and transport processes.Comment: Main text and supplementary informatio