Media: Wharton traces Shopping Patterns with RFID

"Tag Team: Tracking the Patterns of Supermarket Shoppers" takes us through the recent work of Wharton marketing professors Peter S. Fader and Eric T. Bradlow and their student Jeffrey S. Larson, who have been exploring people's movements through shopping aisles, using RFID tags on trolleys.

'Using a new "multivariate clustering algorithm," the authors identified 14 distinct grocery store travel paths during short, medium and long shopping trips.'

Findings include that grocery shoppers don't weave up and down all aisles - a pattern commonly thought to dominate store travel. Instead, most shoppers 'tend only to travel select aisles, and rarely in the systematic up and down patterns most tend to consider the dominant travel pattern'. And once 'they enter an aisle, shoppers rarely make it to the other end'.

Interestingly, shoppers prefer a counter-clockwise shopping experience. 'They tend to shop more quickly as they approach the checkout counters. Shoppers' behavior is driven more by their location in the store than the merchandise in front of them.'

There's more on the design implications for shopping spaces...

Associated Link: Wharton: Tag Team: Tracking the Patterns of Supermarket Shoppers

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