Factors Impacting Grocery Store Choice in College Students

This paper aims to address the variables taken into account by consumers to choose their new grocery store, as they move into a new town. Grocery stores have loyalty programs, weekly ads, market saturation, multiple formats, and constant in-market communication. The gap in research the author seeks to fill is how do customers, when they move into a new town, determine where they are going to shop. There is significant data on why consumers shop in their preferred stores, but not as much data on how they learned about their preferred stores when they first relocated to a new city. The author uses questionnaire data to determine the primary variables leading to grocery store choice by new to town customers.