Tag Team: Tracking the Patterns of Supermarket Shoppers

Tag Team: Tracking the Patterns of Supermarket Shoppers is a article published in Knowledge Wharton a fantastic e-magazine by Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania).

To the untrained eye, the data presentation looks remarkably like an Etch-a-Sketch drawing, little more than a child's randomly drawn zigzag pattern on a favorite toy.


But to Wharton marketing professor Peter S. Fader, those seemingly random lines represent a new dataset showing the paths taken by individual shoppers in an actual grocery store. The data -- charted for the first time by radio frequency identification (RFID) tags located on consumers' shopping carts -- has the potential to change the way retailers in general think about customers and their shopping patterns.


In a new paper called "An Exploratory Look at Supermarket Shopping Paths," Fader, Wharton marketing professor Eric T. Bradlow and doctoral candidate Jeffrey S. Larson analyze this RFID-captured grocery store data, focusing exclusively on travel patterns without regard to purchase behavior or merchandising tactics. The results, they conclude, challenge many long-standing perceptions of shopper travel behavior within a supermarket, including ideas related to aisle traffic, special promotional displays, and perimeter shopping patterns.

The paper is available at: SSRN