Classifying shoppers by their shopping‐trip behaviour: a polythetic‐divisive method

The movement of shoppers through a city can look chaotic when studied at the individual level. However, statistical analysis shows that aggregate patterns exist for major grocery shopping trips, patterns of movement largely depend on access to a car and how much is bought; for minor shopping trips, location/ convenience tends to be the main consideration. Employs a statistical method ‐ polythetic division of consumer panel data ‐ which is highly flexible and able to handle large amounts of mixed data.