Performance of supermarkets in Santa Catarina: an analysis of small and medium-sized units

Abstract

The retail supermarket sector is one of the most important in the third sector. Besides being one of that most generates direct and indirect jobs, it is one of the first to capture changes in consumer behavior. Given the strong competition and constant evolution of the sector, it is necessary to improve techniques for individual performance measurement of the networks and the construction of parameters of relative comparison between the units. The aim of this article is to analyze the efficiency of a 31 supermarkets sample in Santa Catarina, using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The variables used in the investigation were gross sales, the number of employees, sales area and number of checkout's in the period of 2014 and 2015. The results pointed out a low percentage of units at maximum efficiency for the two periods analyzed. Another relevant finding was that the variables that presented a mismatch to reach the maximum efficiency of the units was the “Sales area (m2)” and “number of employees“, suggesting the existence of idle structure capacity.

Measuring the performance of retailers during the COVID-19 pandemic: Embedding optimal control theory principles in a dynamic data envelopment analysis approach

“…A DEA approach has already been proposed for measuring the performance of small and medium-sized supermarkets in a specific region of Brazil (Santa Catarina) [33] . Once the authors did not consider the pandemic period and e-commerce aspects, the results are not comparable.…”

“…The DEA approaches kept been widely used for measuring physical and operational aspects of retailing performance until nowadays, for example, integration between fuzzy Delphi and DEA for measuring the performance of retail electronic chains [32] , basic DEA models for measuring the performance of small supermarkets [33] , and a basic DEA model for measuring the performance of apparel retailers [34] . Similarly, a paper used lean theory to choose the variables to measure a supermarket's performance with a DEA model [35] .…”