Social distancing and store choice in times of a pandemic

Abstract

Public health officials enforced several measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic that affected grocery stores, such as limits on store capacities and enforcement of masks and physical distancing among customers. Nevertheless, these measures can provoke queues, which could drive customers away from stores. In this study, we investigate how customers trade off between social distancing measures and increased waiting times during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our data comes from an online survey applied in New York City in May 2020. This survey included a set of discrete choice experiments framed in virtual stores, as well as a set of psychometric indicators regarding the pandemic. With this data, we estimated a latent class conditional logit model where assignment to classes is correlated with COVID-19 latent variables. We identified three latent classes with preference structures that valued social distancing to varying degrees. In spite of this heterogeneity in preferences, we found that customers were willing to wait longer to access stores with better social distancing measures. This result suggests that stores could increase, rather than decrease, their sales if they enforce public health measures at the expense of longer waiting times.

Pandemic-driven consumer behaviour: A foraging exploration

“…Studies also highlight a number of factors that should be considered in future studies and which may impact directly on responses to pandemics such as childhood socioeconomic status (Park et al, 2021a), gender (Collignon, 2020; Truong and Truong, 2022), vulnerability (Dickins and Schalz, 2020), concern about the pandemic (Rossetti et al, 2022) age, income, job stability (Mehta et al, 2020; Rossetti et al, 2022; Truong and Truong, 2022) and geographical distance from the epicentre of the pandemic (Li et al, 2021). Foraging studies on human hunter gatherer populations highlight how it may be important to study different roles within a community, and household and age-sex differences in goals and constraints (Kaplan and Hill, 1992).…”

“…Manufacturers and retailers should also be aware of how currencies shift during the pandemic and consumers priorities change perhaps highlighting key features that are sought, using targeted sales promotions and prioritise supply in a timely manner depending on stage of the pandemic. Finally, consumers are willing to travel further and wait longer for stores which they considered safer because they had good COVID safety procedures (Rossetti et al, 2022). Changes to the servicescape are both possible and welcomed (Pilawa et al, 2022) and stores should prepare those protocols for immediate action during a pandemic (Boyle et al, 2022).…”

Drone Food Delivery: A Solution to Crowding During the Global COVID-19 Pandemic

“…However, Pantano et al [53] stated that customers are more tolerant toward crowding amidst the COVID-19 outbreak. Still, customers tend to prefer shops with better social distancing and are willing to wait in long lines to gain store access [54].…”

Preferences for online grocery shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic — the role of fear-related attitudes

“…In the current study we use data from the latter CE. Information about data collection, survey design, and modeling of the first CE can be found in Rossetti et al (2022) .…”