Publications

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November 2019 (Revised December 2020)
Case

Grupo Éxito: Facing Colombia's Competitive Grocery Retail Industry

By: José B. Alvarez, Carla Larangeira, Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago and Miguel Diaz Moreno

Grupo Éxito, a leading South American retailer, faced declining market shares in Colombia in 2019 with the arrival of low-cost competitors and emerging digital trends. Originally founded in Medellín, Éxito had over the course of its seventy-year history evolved from a... View Details

Keywords: Grocery; Market Share; Information Technology; Trends; Competitive Strategy; Retail Industry; Colombia; Latin America

November 1999 (Revised March 2003)
Case

Webvan: Groceries on the Internet

By: John A. Deighton and Kayla Bakshi

What are the prospects for grocery shopping on the Web? This case invites a comparison of seven business models, with particular emphasis on Webvan. Why does the investment community value Webvan at $7.8 billion after less than six months of operating experience, and... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Experience and Expertise; Investment; Information; Marketing; Distribution Channels; Service Delivery; Cognition and Thinking; Internet and the Web; Retail Industry; Service Industry

26 Feb 2014
Research & Ideas

How Grocery Bags Manipulate Your Mind

out that an everyday item has the power to act as both angel and devil every time we go to the grocery store. It lurks in car trunks and pantries all over the world, waiting to guide us simultaneously down paths of virtue and vice. What... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail

26 Feb 2014
News

How Grocery Bags Manipulate Your Mind

02 Aug 2018
News

Smaller Grocery Stores Might Be Making A Comeback

17 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

Where Did My Shopping Mall Go?

of our interview with authors Rajiv Lal and José B. Alvarez, they discuss what the future of storefront retailing looks like and how its transformation will also change the economy and society. Sean Silverthorne: What is happening to the View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

01 Dec 2019
News

Capitalizing the Corner Shop

photo by Getty Images photo by Getty Images When Samuel Ejeh decides to open a new location for his Lagos-based supermarket chain Grocery Bazaar, he likes to move quickly. But expansion is capital-intensive, constraining his cash flow,... View Details

Keywords: Dan Morrell

26 Jun 2017
News

How Cellophane Changed the Way We Shop for Food

26 Jun 2017
Research & Ideas

How Cellophane Changed the Way We Shop for Food

oxygen that touched a product, thus preventing discoloration. “Cellophane played a big part in how the color of food started to be controlled and standardized,” she says. The rise of self-service grocery stores Through the turn of the... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Food & Beverage; Retail; Advertising

August 2020 (Revised March 2021)
Case

Migros Turkey: Scaling Online Operations (A)

By: Antonio Moreno and Gamze Yucaoglu

The case opens in November 2019 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey’s oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are contemplating what the best fulfillment format and... View Details

Keywords: Retail; Grocery; Business Model; Emerging Markets; For-Profit Firms; Strategy; Digital Platforms; Information Technology; Technology Adoption; Value Creation; Globalization; Competition; Expansion; Logistics; Profit; Resource Allocation; Corporate Strategy; Turkey

20 Mar 2020
News

How grocery stores restock shelves in the age of coronavirus

December 2015 (Revised February 2016)
Case

Ocado

By: José Alvarez, David E. Bell and Damien McLoughlin

In 2015, U.K.-based Ocado was the world's largest pure player in the online home-delivery grocery business and was gaining a growing share of the highly competitive U.K. grocery market. Ocado had made heavy investments in technology, including a highly automated... View Details

22 Aug 2022
Research & Ideas

Can Amazon Remake Health Care?

like shopping for the other items that Amazon might be selling.” Chandra: Amazon is an enormous company. I think we’re all excited because it’s Amazon, but the reality is that it’s a $4 billion expense for a company that has $160 billion... View Details

Keywords: by Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette; Health

22 Apr 2015
News

Do Reusable Bags Affect Your Diet?

21 Oct 2014
News

Showdown In The Produce Aisle: Whole Foods Vs. Walmart

14 Jul 2015
News

Shoppers Buy More Junk Food When They Bring Their Own Bags

2007
Working Paper

Mental Accounting and Small Windfalls: Evidence from an Online Grocer

By: Katherine L. Milkman, John Beshears, Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman

We study the effect of small windfalls on consumer spending decisions by examining the purchasing behavior of a sample of online grocery shoppers over the course of a year. We compare the purchases customers make when redeeming a $10-off coupon they received from their... View Details

Keywords: Spending; Consumer Behavior; Mathematical Methods; Food and Beverage Industry; Retail Industry

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September 2018
Article

Religious Shoppers Spend Less Money

By: Didem Kurt, J. Jeffrey Inman and Francesca Gino

Although religion is a central aspect of life for many people across the globe, there is scant research on how religion affects people’s non-religious routines. In the present research, we identify a frequent consumption activity that is influenced by religiosity:... View Details

Keywords: Religion; Spending; Consumer Behavior; Values and Beliefs

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2020
Working Paper

Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Consumption: The Impact of Access and Value

By: Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson and Georgia Perakis

The goal of this paper is to leverage household-level data to improve food-related policies aimed at increasing the consumption of fruits and vegetables (FVs) among low-income households. Currently, several interventions target areas where residents have limited... View Details

Keywords: Food Deserts; Food Access; Food Policy; Causal Inference; Food; Nutrition; Poverty; Government Administration