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Parents and Children in Supermarkets: Incidence and Influence

Article  in  Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services · January 2017

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2017.08.023

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Parents and Children in Supermarkets: Incidence and Influence

Abstract
Children influence up to a fifth of all household purchase decisions, yet little is known about
how this influence is brought to bear. This research looks at the primary householder
purchase context of grocery shopping and establishes the incidence of children accompanying
adult shoppers. It identifies the effect of their presence on the spend, time taken to complete
the trip and the route taken in-store. More than 33 000 observations are analysed, using exit
interviews and structured observation of the in-store location of shoppers across two
Australian states and four grocery retail outlets.

Refuting the commonly held assertion that taking children shopping makes you spend more,
accompanied shoppers do not spend more than unaccompanied shoppers, but rather shop
15% faster, tending to avoid busy areas in-store.

We establish that, on average, 17% of grocery store shoppers are accompanied by children.
Children are seen to accompany adults on both small and larger spend grocery shopping trips.
Men, who are known to grocery shop less frequently than women, are found to have a lower
incidence of being accompanied by a child when they do shop.

This has implications for store layout and services offered. Products for children and parents
need to be placed in areas where parents are more comfortable (that is, less busy areas), but
also merchandised in ways that make it easy for parents to shop at their faster pace. The
balance of these two needs is a direction for future research.

Keywords: children, pester power, shopper behavior, supermarkets

Introduction
Children have a key influence on household purchasing behavior, with their preferences
being taken into account in an estimated fifth of all purchase decisions; the greatest influence
being found for lower value and own consumption decisions (McNeal, 1992). Defining
children broadly as anyone under the age of 18 years of age, this represents a group of 604
million people in the East Asia/Pacific region (Hsieh et al., 2006)
and constitutes approximately 25% of the Australian population. A primary context for
influence is supermarket shopping. Children have been estimated to physically accompany
adults shopping in 20 per cent of supermarket visits, with parents who were accompanied by
children spending, on average, 25 per cent more (Thomas and Garland, 1993). So, a realistic
estimate may be that toddlers to teenagers influence at least $17bn worth of supermarket
revenue in Australia alone (IBISWorld, 2011) – which does not include the considerable
potential for influence children may hold outside of the store and across other purchasing
contexts.

While knowledge exists regarding the in-store behaviour of adult shoppers (e.g. Hui et al.,
2009a; Hui et al., 2013; Sorensen, 2012; Sorensen et al., 2017; Sorensen and Suher, 2010) far
less is known about children’s in-store behaviours. The research on children in-store has
generally related to their product requests (e.g. Atkin, 1978; Buijzen and Valkenburg, 2008;
Gram, 2015) and children’s education as consumers and response to advertising (see John,
1999 for a foundational review of the topic). As a result, little understanding exists as to the
influence of children on their parents’ overall shopping behavior. This paper uses known
benchmarks for in-store patterns of shopper behaviour to compare grocery shopping with and
without children. We investigate the incidence of adult shoppers taking a child with them to
the store, and how their spend differs from non-accompanied shoppers. We examine if
shoppers with children shop a store differently in terms of time, spend, and navigation. These
questions are fundamental for manufacturers and retailers to know as they influence a range
of decisions from how stores are stocked and laid out through to aids, such as children’s’
trolleys and play areas, that may be used to assist the shopper.

Literature and Research Questions

Because little has been researched and reported about the behaviours of children
accompanying adults grocery shopping, fundamental observational research is a useful first
step in knowledge development. Observational research about general shopper behaviour has
found repeating patterns (e.g Sorensen, 2009; Sorensen et al., 2017; Underhill, 1999) and
such descriptive research is the first step in theory development (Ehrenberg, 1994). Without a
sound basis in observed reality, theory runs the risk of merely reflecting the researcher’s
preconceived notions (Rust, 1993). Generalisations about how shoppers behave in a store,
such as the navigation paths typically adopted, provide behavioural norms for marketers,
retailers, and researchers. Just as architects should work within the laws of physics, marketers
and retailers should tailor their offerings to work with rather than against these clear
behavioural patterns. Given the intensity of competition in the retail sector (Knox and
Denison, 2000; Leszczyc et al., 2000), retailers and manufacturers who understand the
fundamental patterns of shopper behaviour and adapt their practices will have a competitive
edge.

Prior research about children and parents in supermarkets has focused on product requests
and parental reactions (e.g. Atkin, 1978; Holden, 1983; Isler et al., 1987). Detailed
observations of parents and children in supermarkets and clothing stores have led to an
understanding of shopping as a negotiation, rather than adversarial, process as an appropriate
conceptualization (Darian, 1998; Gram, 2015). The current research focus on product
requests and parental reactions focuses the prior work on just one part of the store or product
category (Buijzen and Valkenburg, 2008; Gaumer and Arnone, 2010; O’Dougherty et al.,
2006), as opposed to the overall patterns of shopping behaviour such as store navigation and
spend. This paper addresses that gap.

Even given the existing body of knowledge about the activities of children and parents in
store (e.g. Atkin, 1978; Buijzen and Valkenburg, 2008; Darian, 1998; Gaumer and Arnone,
2010; Gram, 2015; Holden, 1983; Wells and Lo Sciuto, 1966), no research in the last 20
years has determined the incidence of accompanied shoppers in the retail grocery setting –
yet this is one of the key settings for family expenditure (Isler et al., 1987). A reason for this
gap is that prior recent research in stores used convenience samples of either shoppers
entering an aisle (e.g. Atkin, 1978; Gaumer and Arnone, 2010), or pre-arranged trips with
shoppers (e.g. Holden, 1983), both of which are biased samples. While this has yielded
knowledge about the ways in which children and parents interact in stores, it has not allowed
researchers to understand the basic prevalence of shopping with children. As a first step, we
systematically sample the shoppers entering retail grocery stores to obtain an estimate of the
prevalence of children and how this may vary in relation to the demographic make-up of the
stores’s catchment area.

Focus group research has found adults take longer to complete a shop when they have
children with them, and that they would generally prefer not to take children shopping with
them as it is stressful and exhausting (Pettersson et al., 2004; Wilson and Wood, 2004). This
supports other findings that nearly two-thirds of parents report having problems managing
their children in-store (Sanders and Hunter, 1984) and that makes both activities more
difficult (see Craig, 2006; Holden, 1983). It seems that when a child is present, habitual
behaviours may change (Drèze and Hoch, 1998). In the only research to directly compare the
spend and duration of shopping trips with and without children, Thomas & Garland (1993)
found that shoppers on their self-defined “regular” weekly grocery shop spent 24% more
($124 rather than $100), and took 10% longer than the “average” shopper when they had
accompanying children (34 versus 31 minutes). However, the findings did not account for the
household composition: families with more people necessarily need more food and this may
explain the noted variation. They also only had a small sample on which they based these
findings (54 shoppers with children and 232 without).

An additional characteristic of most research about adults in-store with children is that the
focus has been on female adult shoppers. This is understandable given they are the main
grocery retail shopper. However, the nature of fatherhood has undergone significant change
in the last decade (Nash and Basini, 2008; Yeung et al., 2001). Fathers are more often sharing
responsibilities (Silver, 2000), or staying home to rear children (Fields, 2004), and are
spending more time with their children than ever before (Gauthier et al., 2004). Mothers go
shopping with their children up to four times as often as fathers (O’Dougherty et al., 2006;
Pettersson et al., 2004), though it is not known if this incidence varies by trip length (e.g.
quick or slow) or type (e.g. top up versus big shop) and how these metrics may have changed
in the last 10 years.

Given that shopping with a child present is more difficult (Sanders and Hunter, 1984), it is
reasonable to expect that being accompanied shopping means it will take longer to buy the
same number of items. Social facilitation theory predicts that the larger the group, the more
resources consumed, and the longer the time spent on an activity (Sommer et al., 1992). In
support of this, shoppers who are unaccompanied have been observed to spend slightly less
money than those accompanied by another adult (Sommer et al., 1992), who spend less again
than those accompanied by a child (Thomas and Garland, 1993). Time spent in store has been
found to increase by 10% when children (defined in the prior research as under 18 years of
age) accompany the shopper (Thomas and Garland, 1993). A limitation of this prior work is
that Thomas & Garland (1993) restricted their sample to shoppers on a self-defined “major”
grocery shopping trip, which is not representative of all shopping trips in general, which are
weighted towards smaller trips for fewer items (Larson et al., 2005; Sorensen, 2009;
Sorensen et al., 2017). Based on this prior research, we expect that shoppers accompanied by
children will take longer to purchase items, on a per-item basis and spend more on their trips.

Shoppers move in recognizable patterns within grocery retail spaces (Sorensen et al., 2017).
Patterns in shopping paths through the store such as the “race track” (Farley and Ring, 1966;
Larson et al., 2005; Sorensen, 2009), preferences for the ends of aisles rather than the middle
(Hui et al., 2009a), and the “u-turn” (Sorensen, 2009) have been documented across varying
store formats and countries. Crowding is also seen to influence consumer behaviour: it has
been found to decrease shopping and purchase intentions (Harrell et al., 1980), and while it
draws people to a section, decreases their likelihood of stopping to shop there (Hui et al.,
2009b). The “butt brush” effect may be a contributor to this, where if shoppers cannot browse
without being bumped by other shoppers, sales will decline in those areas (Underhill, 1999).
Sorensen’s (2009) advice is therefore to have less “aisleness” – that is, to have wider aisles
and less floor space devoted to shelving. This is because crowding is a stressor to humans
(Epstein, 1981), which changes the behaviour of children and parents (Langer and Saegert,
1977). People attempt to enact strategies to give them more control when confronted with
crowding (Epstein, 1981), and so we expect that parents attempt to avoid crowding when
shopping with children to an even greater extent than when they shop alone because of their
lower tolerance threshold for crowding.

In summary, this paper addresses key gaps in knowledge about adults grocery shopping with
children. It establishes the incidence of accompanied shopping and how this incidence can be
predicted by store catchment area demographics. It looks at the spend, time in store, average
basket size and navigation patterns of accompanied and non-accompanied shoppers to
determine what similarities and differences exist by differences in shopping party
composition.

Method
While surveys are popular tools, they can be unsuitable for research into areas where people
are asked to recall low-involvement, habitual behaviour (Young and Hetherington, 1996). In-
store observational research “…does not depend on the respondent's ability to interpret a
questionnaire question correctly, or on the respondent's memory of a not very important and
perhaps not very recent event. It is not influenced by any tendency to rationalize behaviour to
make it appear in the best light” (Wells and Lo Sciuto, 1966). In the context of a supermarket
with tens of thousands of items, and trip durations of only a few minutes, it is unlikely that
recalled behaviour will accurately represent actual behaviour (Sharp and Tustin, 2003).

The value of observing shoppers in situ has been discussed by many researchers (Bloch et al.,
1994; Granbois, 1968; Shankar et al., 2011). Natural observations of shoppers in-store have
superior validity to experiments in laboratory environments or shoppers’ self-reports (East
and Uncles, 2008; Lee and Collins, 1999; Rust, 1993; Scamell-Katz, 2012; Schwarz, 1999).
Because shoppers are often not conscious of habitual behaviours, self-reports may be little
more than a post-hoc rationalisation of what shoppers believe they do in a store (Martin and
Morich, 2011; Underhill, 1999). Furthermore, shoppers have a tendency to forget routine
behaviours (East et al., 2008; Sudman and Bradburn, 1973). In contrast to survey data,
observational data provide a reliable foundation for establishing empirical generalisations
about the nature of shopper behavior, especially in this context of repetitive low involvement
behaviours (Adler and Adler, 1994).

Exit interviews
To investigate our initial questions about incidence rates of children accompanying adults
shopping and the resultant effect on shopping speed and spend we use in-store observation
and an exit survey in four stores to capture basket size, spend, time in store, shopping party
size and composition, household size and composition, and shopper gender. These are used to
calculate rates of shopping for accompanied and non-accompanied shoppers. In order to
randomize the sample, every fifth shopper to enter the store was asked to take a brightly
coloured sticker with them through the store, either stuck to their chest or to the trolley
handle, and researchers stood at the exit of the store with the survey instrument and small
chocolate incentives. In total, 1611 exit interviews were conducted across four stores. The
number of items selected and time of exit was recorded from the shopper’s docket, which, as
the time is printed at the beginning of the transaction, time spent waiting for the transaction to
take place is removed from the measure. Additionally, multiple units of the same SKU are
recorded as a single item, which, as the selection of the product has already been made, is
more representative of the shopping process.

In comparing mean shopping spend and time values found between this research and those of
previous researchers, it is important to note that the prior study (Thomas and Garland, 1993)
first asked shoppers if they were on a “regular major grocery shopping trip”. This current
research does not. We also count two of SKUs that are the same as a single item, in order to
simplify data collection (as this is recorded on the receipt), and because the decision about
which product to buy only needs to be made once. For this reason, rather than dollar value
differences, only proportional differences between the behaviour of accompanied and
unaccompanied shoppers should be used as a comparison measure across studies.

Density maps
The investigation of shopper movements through the store uses density maps, a popular
technique among practitioners (Heaney, 2015) and increasingly so amongst academics,
(Sorensen et al., 2017) to understand in-store behaviour. To generate density maps of a store,
paper maps are made where the walkable floorspace of a store is divided up into many zones,
each a few square meters in size, to be easily observed by a researcher traversing the store.
These maps are used to record the location of every shopper in a store at regular intervals as
the researcher moves through the store in a continuous trip. The number of shoppers in each
zone is summed across observations, and divided by the square meterage of the zone. The
degree of difference above or below the standardized mean density is then used to color each
zone to produce density maps of the store for shoppers with and without children present.1
Then, the two density maps (of accompanied and unaccompanied shoppers) are compared to
find differences in behaviour. This is repeated across stores to identify repeatable patterns, in
the spirit of significant sameness, rather than significant difference (Bound and Ehrenberg,
1989); that is by comparing findings against prior research, and, if possible, multiple sets of
data in a single study (Ehrenberg and Bound, 1993).

Four stores in total, two in Adelaide and two in Sydney, were mapped in this way. The stores
were selected as part of another wider research project, yet were typical of grocery retailers in
format but varied in the socio-demographic make-up of their surrounding catchment area.

1
As every shopper must pass through the registers, these have been excluded from the
calculation of mean density of pathways and aisles, and exist on their own scale.
Results

Incidence of Children In-store

Across the four stores, 17% of shoppers were accompanied by a child. However, this varied
by store with a range of 10-26% of shoppers being accompanied by children (see Error!
Reference source not found.1). The variation in children in the store correlates with the
proportion of households with children in the surrounding community2 (r = .997) and the
corresponding proportion of such shoppers who are in the store (r = .989). This is to be
expected as the profile of the grocery shopping population reflects the wider catchment area
population within which it sits. When plotted, this relationship appears to be linear, though
more data would be required to have certainty in the generalizability of this finding.

50
Proportion of HHs with children in area

45

40

35

30

25

20
5 10 15 20 25 30
Proportion of shoppers with children in store

That the proportion of shoppers in-store who have children in the household is higher than in
the community may be explained by the need to feed more people, and so therefore the
behavior of shopping more often and hence their greater incidence in our samples. Averaged
across the four stores, 66% percent of shoppers with children in their household were without
children on the shopping trip in which they were observed and interviewed.

2
Using the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics data for the relevant Statistical
Area 2 geographical regions. The Statistical Areas Level 2 (SA2) is defined by the Australian
Bureau of Statistics as representing "a community that interacts together socially and
economically.” These range in size, but have an average population of 10 000 people (ABS
2016).
Table 1: Presence of children amongst shoppers and catchment area, by store

% with % with % HHs with

chn in chn in chn in area
store HH (ABS, 2011)
Store A 10 31 27
Store B 12 37 28
Store C 15 43 33
Store D 26 64 48
Average 17 44 34

Household size and the Presence of Children In-store

Families with at least three children were more likely to take a child with them shopping
(42% on average observed) compared to families with at least one child, but fewer than three
in their household (32%, X2=9, df=1, p=0.003). The proportion of trips where all children are
present on a shop drops quickly after families have more than one child. In families with
more than three children, we saw very few trips with all the children accompanying the
shopper. This could be because shopping with three or more children is logistically more
difficult than with one or two children, and so a parent or older child remains home to care
for the children during the shopping trip, or it could be because they are more likely to have
an older child who is engaging in independent activities.

Table 2: Proportion of children present by number of children in HH, n=1510

Number of Chn present (%) All Chn in

family
Chn in HH 0 1 2 3 4 present (%)
0 98 2 - - - -
1 69 30 1 - - 30
2 68 17 14 1 - 14
3 58 23 5 13 1 13
4+ 55 29 12 0 4 4
% of all
shopping 86 10 3 1 0 18
groups

Children and Basket Size

Prior studies have not investigated the prevalence of children in-store across types of trip, and
have tended to screen samples for respondents who are on a “major” shopping trip. It was
therefore not known if the prevalence of children accompanying adults would vary for the
shorter (and also more frequent) shopping trips. The findings are that children are no more or
less likely to accompany the shopper on short or long shopping trips; correlation coefficients
between the curves are between 0.97 and 0.99, indicating no difference.

Figure 1: Comparison of distributions for SKUs purchased (n = 1468)

25

20
Proportion of shopping trips

15

10

Number of SKUs purchased

No Chn in HH Chn in HH, No chn in store Chn in HH, Chn in store

Gender differences in shopping also apply to children

Gender differences in shopping and child rearing behaviour may influence the types of
activities children participate in with mothers and fathers. Women spend over two and a half
times the amount of time caring for children than men (Australian Bureau of Statistics,
2016b), and are overwhelmingly seen in supermarkets more: in the stores in this study, 69%
of all shopping groups observed were solely female. As a proportion of the trips they do
make, men are also seen with children less often. Table 3 shows that, in households with
children present, women are 1.6 times more likely to take a child with them shopping than
men in the same constituted household (X2=9, df=3, p=0.034).
Table 3: Parental gender and children accompanied shops (of HHs with Chn)

Proportion of trips
per gender of M F M&F
parent (n=129) (n=431) (n=22)
Without children 78 63 64
With children 22 37 36
M-F difference 1.6x

Men make less than a quarter (22%) of the shopping trips of households with children, and
when they do shop, they do so somewhat less with children accompanying them (60% the
level of women). Men are also less likely to take children on the most common types of trip:
those where fewer than 20 items are purchased. This represents the bulk of trips (see Figure
2). Women, however, are equally likely to be accompanied by a child across all types of
shopping trip. Of households with children, only 29 trips (2% of all trips recorded) were men
shopping with children, which speaks to both the rarity of men shopping at all, and of men
shopping with their children. These average numbers across all trips are lower than the store
average of 17% because they look across all trips rather than an average calculated across the
four stores.

Figure 2: Accompanied trips by gender of adult

Women Men
60 60

50 50
Proportion of trips
Proportion of trips

40 40

30 30

20 20

10 10

0 0
1-10 11- 21- 31- 41- 51- 60+
20 30 40 50 60

SKUs Purchased Skus Purchased

Without Chn With Chn Without Chn With Chn
Shopping Speed with Children in the Household or Accompanied In-
store
People with children under the age of 18 years in the household shop faster, even if the
children are not with them in the store. Accompanied shoppers take less time to buy
approximately the same number of items and spend approximately the same amount of
money. This was found in three of the four stores observed. In the single store where this
pattern did not hold, a lower average basket size (12 vs 19) and spend ($43 vs $96) was seen.
Additionally, 85% of the baskets in this store were under 20 SKUs in size, compared with an
average of 66% for the other stores. As seen in the next section, this may explain why the
differences between accompanied and unaccompanied shoppers are less distinct in this store.

Table 4: Descriptives of aggregated shopping trips with and without children (n=1553)

SKUs
W/out With %
Chn Chn diff
Mean 19 19 0
Median 12 13 8
StDev 16 19

Duration (mins)
W/out With %
Chn Chn diff
Mean 26 22 -15
Median 20 17 -15
StDev 23 16

Spend ($)
W/out With %
Chn Chn diff
Mean 67 68 2
Median 44 41 -6
StDev 66 68

Shoppers with children shop faster

While it may appear that our findings run contrary to Thomas and Garland’s (1993) finding
that shoppers accompanied by children spend more time and money in store and buy more,
this may simply be the effect of having a larger family and not attributable to the dynamic of
having a child physically present while shopping. To investigate this, we compare shopper
behavior while controlling for the effect of basket size on the duration of the shopping trip.
In order to control for the number of items bought, we compare the mean duration of trips
taken by shoppers purchasing a similar number of items. As the number of items purchased
correlates highly with the amount of money spent (Pearson’s r=.9), comparing only the
number of items (neglecting spend) with duration is possible.

In Figure 3Error! Reference source not found., we see that shoppers accompanied by
children take between 5-10 minutes less to purchase the same number of items. For trips that
are for only a few items (that is, 1-10 items) and short in duration (less than 20 minutes),
there does not appear to be a large effect from the presence of children. This is possibly
because for shorter trip, navigation between shelves to get to the relevant category to shop
from constitutes the majority of time on the trip, rather than any at-shelf decision making. It
is the at-shelf dynamics of having a child in-store where we would expect the trip to be
slowed down.

Figure 3: No of SKU purchased versus average trip duration (by presence of children in store and HH)

50
No of SKU purchased vs average trip duration
45
Average trip duration (mins)

40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1-5 6-10 11-15 16-20 21-25 26-30 31-35 36-40
Number of SKUs purchased

No chn in HH/store (n=885) Chn in HH, No chn in store (n=385)

Chn in store, Chn in HH (n=198)

Children affect shopping trips without being present

Table 5, below, is arranged from left to right in increasing order of potential influence of
children. The first column are shoppers with neither children in the household, nor present on
their observed trip. The second is shoppers with children in the household, but not present on
that shopping trip, and the third is shoppers with both children in the household, and present
in-store when observed.
Mean measures of spend and number of items purchased appear to increase and trip duration
decrease as the potential influence of children increases. Having children in the household is
associated with the purchase of more items (as you would expect), but also with a decrease in
the amount of time available to shop.

Table 5: Mean trip characteristics between presence of children in house and store

Children
No children present
present
No chn Chn in Chn in
in HH HH HH
(n=885) (n=358) (n=198)
Duration 26 23 22
Spend 59 68 70
Items 17 19 20

Shoppers with Children and Crowds

We see that in each store, shoppers with children have a higher coefficient of variation of
average zone densities than shoppers without children present (see Table 6). Average zone
density can be thought of as the likelihood that there will be people present in an area of the
store, taking into account the size of the area and the number of people seen at any one time
in each area. This means that shoppers accompanied by children are more dispersed through
the store than shoppers without children, and therefore less easy to target with in-store
promotional activity. To understand where the differences are, we next examine the density
maps (see Figure 4).

Table 6: Comparison of coefficient of variation of zone density

Store A Store B Store C Store D

Adults 0.50 0.65 0.47 0.50

Adults
with 0.70 0.99 0.63 0.65
children
present
Figure 4: Example density maps

Figure 5A: Example density map of regular Figure 5B: Example density map of
shoppers shoppers with children
Shade Standard deviations from Shade Interpretation
standardised mean
≥1.25 Very crowded
≥0.75 - <1.25 Somewhat crowded
≥0.25 - <0.75 Slightly crowded
≥-0.25 - <0.25 Average
≥-0.75 - <-0.25 Slightly unoccupied
≥-1.25 - <-0.75 Somewhat unoccupied
≥-1.25 Very empty
Figure 5: Example density maps

When we compare the density maps of accompanied and unaccompanied shoppers, we see
four key descriptive patterns that repeat across each of the stores. The number of stores each
pattern is seen in (out of the four stores possible) is noted in brackets:
1. Accompanied shoppers are less likely to be seen in busy areas (observed in four out of

four stores)

a. Such as the produce section (4/4)

 i. Increased in front of bays, decreased in pathways (3/33)

2. Accompanied shoppers use different registers to unaccompanied shoppers

a. The express lane is used less (4/4)

b. Accompanied shoppers use registers far away from the express lane (4/4)

3. Accompanied shoppers are more likely to be seen at self-serve snacks than

unaccompanied shoppers (2/2 as only two stores had this facility)

4. Accompanied shoppers are more likely to be seen at the bakery section than

unaccompanied shoppers (3/44)

The reduced use of the express lane is understandable given shoppers with children are seen
to buy more items as their household is bigger. The findings in relation to the higher
frequenting of bakery and self-serve snacks by accompanied shoppers could be explained by
the fact these items are high penetration categories when children are in a household.

Discussion and Implications

While accompanied shoppers in our sample were seen to spend slightly (and non-
significantly) more than unaccompanied, it was not in the order of 25% more seen in prior
research (Thomas and Garland, 1993). This may merely be an effect of Thomas’s research
removing shoppers who perceived themselves to be conducting a non-regular shop, which
this study did not do. The sample in this study therefore captured smaller basket shops which
were screened from prior studies. This makes the current findings more representative of
actual in-store behavior for all shoppers. This study also compares like households with like,
that is, households with children against each other. For those seeking to use pester power to
influence shoppers to purchase more items, this appears to be evidence that if it is an
effective strategy, it does not appear to be working while shoppers are actually in the store.
One explanation could be that, as shoppers with children present are shopping at a faster rate
than shoppers without children, they simply do not have time to listen to children’s pleas for
products. A more fruitful place for persuasion attempts to take place, and be researched, may

3
In our pilot store, the tracking method used did not allow for this type of observation.
4
In the fourth store, there was a very popular bakery at the entrance, which may explain
why this does not exist in all stores.
be in the home environment. An alternative explanation is that children may not have much
influence over the number, price, or categories of products purchased, but may instead have
their influence limited to the specific brand chosen.

Prior literature suggests that shoppers accompanied by children will spend longer in the store,
due to the additional task of supervising a child and buying more items for a bigger
household (Sommer et al., 1992; Thomas and Garland, 1993). However, this research finds
that the opposite is true. Shoppers accompanied by children shopped 15% faster for the same
number of items, than shoppers unaccompanied by children. A likely explanation may be that
parents have less time overall. That shoppers with children in their households, but not in the
store, still shopped faster than shoppers without children in their households, could be
interpreted as either a reflection of less influence of children when they are less present, or
indeed that unaccompanied shopping represents a break from normal tasks, which may
encourage longer trips.

That shoppers appear to be avoiding crowded areas when they navigate is a natural extension
of Underhill’s (1999) Butt Brush Law. It may be that a person’s physical space is expanded
when shopping with a child in a way it is not when shopping with another adult. We see this
in the way children are more commonly seen in front of product bays, away from pathways:
parents may be helping children to stay out of the way of other shoppers, or children may be,
themselves, keeping out of the way. This expansion of personal space may have practical
implications for retail environments, not only those for the general public, such as
supermarkets and department stores, but especially for stores expecting higher-than-normal
patronage from shoppers with children present, such as toy or baby stores. Practically, in
order to better cater for shoppers with children, wider aisles could be added in areas children
are likely to be present, or rest areas could be implemented, away from busy parts of the store
– which could be stocked with products of interest to parents and children. The bakery and
bulk foods sections are also good places to feature child- or parent-focused items.

On average, 17% of grocery store shoppers are accompanied by a child. This number will
vary slightly from store to store, reflective of the surrounding catchment area. Overall, while
children were only present on 60% of the trips made by households that could take children
with them, shoppers do not appear to favor taking their children on big or small shopping
trips. We believe that this reflects behaviour being habitual or for convenience, rather than
being an effort to teach children consumer skills (Moschis et al., 1984; Ward et al., 1977),
which would see larger shops being more accompanied as there is more to teach on these
occasions, this behavior is more likely to be related to the perceived or actual difficulty in
leaving them behind. Stores expecting their patrons to bring children need to be laid out in
such a fashion as to accommodate them on all trips, rather than only on larger trips. The types
of conveniences that inspire shoppers to visit one store over another on the smaller trips less
commonly associated with the presence of children might be shallow shopping carts with a
child seat, or enough room to have a child at the self-check, or a small piece of fresh fruit
provided at the entry to keep a child occupied.

Finally, evidence presented in this paper implies that stores need only be designed to cater for
a single child, unless specific evidence indicates otherwise – trollies with space for two
children to sit side-by-side may be a rarely-used investment.

Conclusions and future research

That shoppers with and without children present appear to purchase the same number of
items, for the same cost, can be difficult to reconcile with claims of the “gratuitous” influence
of children on shoppers {McDermott, 2006 #26891}. Research to determine the level of
influence on category-level and brand-level decision making is needed to understand if pester
power can be used to build categories. However, it may be that the influence of children is
felt equally regardless of the actual presence of children in the store. In this case, future
research needs to investigate out-of-store locations for product requests, notably the home;
Isler’s (1987) research indicates that only a third of product requests are made in-store while
more than half are in the home.

The competing explanations for the increased shopping speed of shoppers with children
require further research to fully investigate. However, of more importance to practitioners
than the causes of differences in shopping efficiency might be the outcomes. Higher shopper
efficiency (in $/min) has been correlated positively with store turnover (Sorensen, 2009).
While this claim requires further research to determine causality, if it holds, this provides a
rationale for retailers to make efforts to encourage shoppers with children to not only
patronize their store, but to bring children with them in order to increase their speed of
shopping, and thus turnover. This is a fundamental issue in retailing, which will alter all
recommendations made by researchers; do we need to help shoppers shop faster, or should
we attempt to keep them in store longer?

The variation in movement through the store seen by shoppers accompanied by children also
warrants further research. Of interest is whether customers accompanied by children value
more space in which to manage their child to the extent that it would influence their decision
about which store to shop at, or where to physically focus their time on a shopping trip within
a store. This would influence retailers and their store format decisions.

This paper provides a benchmark for child-accompanied grocery shopping behaviour, it is

also a starting point for examining questions of the influence of children being present in-
store on the shopper’s behavior. It uses observational research methods to deliver findings
that are more representative of the grocery shopper population than prior studies which have
worked with skewed samples.

Overall, we do see the emergence of repeatable patterns, such as the relationship between the
proportion of households with children in the community and shoppers with children in
stores, as well as avoiding crowds in stores when accompanied by a child. These findings
need to be replicated across more store formats to further build generalisations and determine
boundary conditions. The level of influence of children may exist on a continuum based on
how focused the store is on products for the child, with toy stores and children’s clothing at
one end, insurance offices and tire stores at the other, with supermarkets and department
stores somewhere in the middle.

Ideally, this research would be replicated across similar cultures, such as the UK and USA.
Early indications are that these findings may not hold where attitudes to children and
parenting are different; for example, see the near 100% acquiescence of parents to child
demands for cereal in western Maryland {Gaumer & Arnone, 2010 #22942}. Different
cultural perceptions of crowding are also likely to influence the results regarding store layout,
and need to be understood before applying the findings of this research to different cultural
settings.

Additionally, this research looks at behaviours once the decision to take a child grocery
shopping has already been made. The decision to take a child or children to the supermarket
in itself warrants more investigation. How do parents make this decision? How, if at all, does
gender of the child, age, shopping mission or other external factors influence the decision?
Another avenue for further research is the instances where children are not present on
shopping trips yet live in the household. It could be that these shoppers are simply leaving
children at home, in the care of older children or fathers, or are opting out of the physical
process completely, and perhaps turning to online supermarkets as a way of avoiding the
physical store.

In this paper, we only begin to explore the effect of the age of the child on shopping. Clearly,
the age of a child influences their understanding, communication, if they are walking or
riding in the trolley, and if they can actually assist in the shopping tasks through, for example,
fetching items (John, 1999). Further exploration of the effect of the different stages of
consumer socialisation on parental behaviour in and out of store is warranted.

While our data does not make it possible to draw conclusions about the motivations or
thought processes of shoppers, aisles such as the baby aisle, where shoppers without children
rarely need to go, may be one of the explanations for the increased dispersion of shoppers
with children. In other instances, where accompanied shoppers are seen less often, such as the
express lane, it appears to be a case of accompanied shoppers avoiding situations where
supervision of a child would be more difficult; that is, avoiding crowded areas. The effects of
time of day and day of week are also likely to be important to this type of research: after-
school shopping trips may be different to Saturday morning trips. Unfortunately, due to the
nature of our data (different days across different stores), investigating this is an issue for
future research.

Given the relatively low incidence of children in stores, and the potential effect on shopping
trips through the mere presence of a child in the household, research about child influence on
parental purchases offers much opportunity to be broadened in scope in the style of Isler et al
(1987) to study settings outside the store. While explicit attempts to influence product
purchases may be easier to research, as they are more concrete and definable, it is perhaps the
“passive dictation” (Wells, 1965) of preferences for products and experiences where children
may exert the most sway. Future research may find evidence of this in shopping lists or
basket content analysis, or through in-home or body-worn recording devices.
This research was not conducted during school holiday time. A comparison between the
current measurements and those taken while children are more available to parents would be
a useful addition to the findings of this paper.

Overall, this paper furthers the knowledge of how young consumers influence household
grocery shopping behavior and provides some guidelines for retailer to response and
direction for future research.

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