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Porta Palazzo, arguably Western Europe's largest open-air market, is a central economic, social, and cultural hub for Italians and migrants in the city of Turin. Open-air markets like Porta Palazzo have existed for centuries in Europe; although their function has changed over time-traditional markets are no longer the primary place to buy food-they remain popular destinations. In an age of supermarkets and online commerce, markets offer unique social and cultural opportunities and bring together urban and rural worldviews. These factors are often overlooked in traditional economic studies of food distribution, but anthropologist Rachel E. Black contends that social relations are essential for building and maintaining valuable links between production and consumption. From the history of Porta Palazzo to the current growing pains of the market, this book concentrates on points where trade meets cultural identities and cuisine. Its detailed and perceptive portraits of the market bring into relief the lives of the vendors, shoppers, and passersby. Black's ethnography illuminates the daily work of market-going and the anxieties of shoppers as they navigate the market. It examines migration, the link between cuisine and cultural identity, culinary tourism, the connection between the farmers' market and the production of local food, and the urban planning issues negotiated by the city of Turin and market users during a recent renovation. This vibrant study, featuring a foreword by Slow Food Movement founder Carlo Petrini, makes a strong case for why markets like Porta Palazzo are critical for fostering culinary culture and social life in cities.

Supermarkets are a mundane feature in the landscape, but as Tracey Deutsch reveals, they represent a major transformation in the ways that Americans feed themselves. In her examination of the history of food distribution in the United States, Deutsch demonstrates the important roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores.Deutsch's analysis reframes shopping as labor and embeds consumption in the structures of capitalism. The supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from straightforward consumer demand for low prices, Deutsch argues, but through government regulations, women customers' demands, and retailers' concerns with financial success and control of the \"shop floor.\" From small neighborhood stores to huge corporate chains of supermarkets, Deutsch traces the charged story of the origins of contemporary food distribution, treating topics as varied as everyday food purchases, the sales tax, postwar celebrations and critiques of mass consumption, and 1960s and 1970s urban insurrections. Demonstrating connections between women's work and the history of capitalism, Deutsch locates the origins of supermarkets in the politics of twentieth-century consumption.

These homemade foods are cheaper and tastier than what you can buy at the supermarket and can reduce the amount of packaging and processed food in your life. Columnist Mike Coren explains.

In this paper, we study an e-grocer’s tactical problem of differentiated time slot pricing in attended home delivery. The purpose of differentiating delivery prices is to influence customers’ choice behavior concerning the offered time slots, such that cost-effective delivery schedules on an operational level can be expected and overall profit is maximized. We present a mixed-integer linear programming formulation of the problem, in which delivery costs are anticipated by explicitly incorporating routing constraints, and we model customer behavior by a general nonparametric rank-based choice model. Concerning cost anticipation, we also propose a model-based approximation that enables application to real-world problem sizes. In a setup inspired by an industry partner operating in urban areas, we then perform a comprehensive computational study that reveals the value of the model-based approximation as a supporting instrument for an e-grocer’s pricing decisions in practice. In particular, we demonstrate the superiority of the model-based approximation for real-world problem sizes to several benchmark approaches applied in the scientific literature and in practice (e.g., a unit price approach and other standard pricing heuristics). The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2017.0738 .

(i) To determine the current state of online grocery shopping, including individuals' motivations for shopping for groceries online and types of foods purchased; and (ii) to identify the potential promise and pitfalls that online grocery shopping may offer in relation to food and beverage purchases. PubMed, ABI/INFORM and Google Scholar were searched to identify published research. To be included, studies must have been published between 2007 and 2017 in English, based in the USA or Europe (including the UK), and focused on: (i) motivations for online grocery shopping; (ii) the cognitive/psychosocial domain; and (iii) the community or neighbourhood food environment domain. Our search yielded twenty-four relevant papers. Findings indicate that online grocery shopping can be a double-edged sword. While it has the potential to increase healthy choices via reduced unhealthy impulse purchases, nutrition labelling strategies, and as a method to overcome food access limitations among individuals with limited access to a brick-and-mortar store, it also has the potential to increase unhealthy choices due to reasons such as consumers' hesitance to purchase fresh produce online. Additional research is needed to determine the most effective ways to positively engage customers to use online grocery shopping to make healthier choices.

Considering a relatively slow adoption of online grocery shopping in the vast majority of the world markets, the main objective of this study was to uncover any new reasons why customers hesitate to shop groceries online. Moreover, we were not looking for undiscovered discouraging reasons only but also intended to validate previously researched reasons in published studies. Thus, we have first used a systematic literature review to cover all relevant previous studies on online grocery non-buyers. Even though this process is time-consuming, it provides a coherent overview of the published material on the topic. Further, we designed a web-based survey of 670 respondents from the general internet population. The data in open-ended questions related to online grocery attitudes and opinions were analysed by the content analysis. 14 thematic units emerged from the process from which the majority confirmed previously researched negative attitudes toward online grocery shopping. Non-buyers prefer to see grocery in person before buying it, there is a distrust in e-tailers to choose the best and freshest grocery, non-buyers prefer personal contact with the seller and behave habitually. Moreover, they tend to shop offline also because of hedonic reasons and pleasure from the shopping experience. Novel reasons why people hesitate to shop online in this category were the time consumption where consumers perceived online shopping slow regarding order-delivery time gap and were reluctant to pay for the delivery service, to mention just a few. We conclude with a summary of our results and a handful of recommendation for e-tail companies.

PurposeThe purpose of the study is to understand how socially shared misinformation and rumors can enhance the motivation to protect personal interests and enhance social practices of panic buying.Design/methodology/approachThe study employed a number of qualitative data collection methods for the purpose of triangulation, as it can offer thick interpretation and can help to develop a context specific research framework.FindingsThe shared misinformation and rumors on social media developed into psychological, physical and social threats; therefore, people started panic buying to avoid these negative consequences. People believed that there were differences between the information shared by politicians and government officials and reality, such as “everything is under control,” whereas social media showed people standing in long queues and struggling to buy the necessities of life. The shared misinformation and rumors on social media became viral and received social validation, which created panic buying in many countries.Research limitations/implicationsIt is the responsibility of government, politicians, leaders, media and the public to control misinformation and rumors, as many people were unable to buy groceries due either to socio-economic status or their decisions of late buying, which increased depression among people.Originality/valueThe study merged the theory of rumor (TORT) transmission and protection motivation theory (PMT) to understand how misinformation and rumors shared through social media increased global uncertainty and the desire to panic buy across the world.

Households incur transaction costs when choosing among off-line stores for grocery purchases. They may incur additional transaction costs when buying groceries online versus off-line. We integrate the various transaction costs into a channel choice framework and empirically quantify the relative transaction costs when households choose between the online and off-line channels of the same grocery chain. The key challenges in quantifying these costs are (i) the complexity of channel choice decision and (ii) that several of the costs depend on the items a household expects to buy in the store, and unobserved factors that influence channel choice also likely influence the items purchased. We use the unique features of our empirical context to address the first issue and the plausibly exogenous approach in a hierarchical Bayesian framework to account for the endogeneity of the channel choice drivers. We find that transaction costs for grocery shopping can be sizable and play an important role in the choice between online and off-line channels. We provide monetary metrics for several types of transaction costs, such as travel time and transportation costs, in-store shopping time, item-picking costs, basket-carrying costs, quality inspection costs, and inconvenience costs. We find considerable household heterogeneity in these costs and characterize their distributions. We discuss the implications of our findings for the retailer's channel strategy.

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.

Examining the performance of cashiers in a French grocery store chain, we find that manager bias negatively affects minority job performance. In the stores studied, cashiers work with different managers on different days and their schedules are determined quasi-randomly. When minority cashiers, but not majority cashiers, are scheduled to work with managers who are biased (as determined by an implicit association test), they are absent more often, spend less time at work, scan items more slowly, and take more time between customers. This appears to be because biased managers interact less with minorities, leading minorities to exert less effort. Manager bias has consequences for the average performance of minority workers: while on average minority and majority workers perform equivalently, on days where managers are unbiased, minorities perform significantly better than do majority workers. The findings are consistent with statistical discrimination in hiring whereby because minorities underperform when assigned to biased managers, the firm sets a higher hiring standard for minorities to get similar average performance from minority and nonminority workers.