Consumer Spatial Behavior Of Supermarket Chains

For consumers, since30years of reform and opening up, while the economic transformationpull the society transformation, driving the transition from production configuration society toconsumerist society, people’ s focus has been transferred from producing to consuming. However,due to the continued high price of high-grade goods, consumers’ goal has aimed at fast consumergoods in order to adapting to current income level. On the other hand, during the transition frommodern society to post-modern society, more and more consumers contend individual, experience-typed and leisure-typed consumption. At the same time, in1990s, numbers of foreign large-scalecomprehensive shopping mall settled in China, just to satisfy the very need of these consumers.Under this background, it’s necessary to discuss the relationship between consumers andconsuming space. While current research on consumption space that mainly focus on macroscopic-scale spatial structure and layout, supra-micro research seldom involves. In this paper, we talkabout the relation between consumer space and consumers’ behavior with the supra-microperspective.The paper mainly discuss about consumers’ spatial-behavior in chain supermarkets throughthe case of Wal-Mart of Ningbo. We explore the spatial behavior of consumer by literature reading,on-the-spot observation, path-following, questionnaire and interview method. The structure of thispaper is as follows. Firstly, we draw forth the supra-micro consumption space that consumers cancontact directly via different scale spatial-layout of Wal-Mart. Then, we discuss the factors thateffect consumers’ spatial-behavior and the feature of consumers’ spatial-behavior by means ofsubjective factors, objective factors, general characters, consuming paths, mobility patterns, etc.Lastly, we can conclude the regular behavior of consumers in the consuming space, such asdistribution of motivation mode type, typical path and flowing direction.