Shopping_travel_survey

The Swiss Study of value of travel time savings (VTTS), conducted by König, Axhausen and Abay (2004) has lead to unexpected high values for shopping trips, especially compared to other trip purposes. Furthermore, apart from destination choice models none information about larger shopping trips can be found in literature. Therefore, on the occasion of a diploma thesis, a study focusing only shopping travel behaviour was conducted. As in Switzerland the discussion about the market entry of foreign discount markets as Aldi or Lidl arose, costumers were interviewed in three supermarkets, any one time in Switzerland, Germany and France Swiss costumers were surveyed about their shopping travel behaviour. In the area of Basel 386 costumers were interviewed when they were queuing for the cash desk at the supermarkets Migros Dreispitz, Géant in St. Louis and Marktkauf in Weil am Rhein. 110 persons returned a filled stated choice questionnaire and represent the data pool for the VTTS calculations. Apart from the VTTS the study gives insight about additional travel time and cost of people who do their purchase abroad, respectively in over-regional shopping centres. Especially the discount market in Germany attracts people from far distances, whereas the classier French supermarket acts like a regional alternative. Moreover it was studied if there are further differences which motivate people to their behaviour. Interestingly, the recognition of the quality does not vary much between the shops. Although some differences concerning the shop preferences
between the customers could have been detected, most attempts of clustering the main unit failed. Further research in the field of destination choice for shopping trips would be eligible. The calculation of the VTTS is based on a set of discrete choice models. Several model attempts lead to the final model which contains elasticity parameters of income and distance besides a dummy-variable of the preferred supermarket-type. This study estimates the VTTS for shopping trips significantly higher than other, similar studies. Depending on the preferred supermarket values between 60 and 110 CHF/h result. The effect of the preference of shopping in low price supermarkets on the VTTS is much stronger than income or the travel distance. In contradiction to the findings of the study by Koenig et al. the value of time falls with larger distances.