Multistop Shopping: An Empirical Analysis of Who and Why

A consumer seeking to purchase multiple products may do so at a single store (one-stop shopping) or across multiple stores (multistop shopping). Fixed shopping or search costs rationalize one-stop shopping, which often emerges as the only equilibrium behavior in theoretical models. In reality, however, multistop shopping is common, and evidence suggests that some consumers adopt it to save on expenditures. This paper uses NielsenIQ consumer scanner data to address two questions about multistop shopping: who engages in it, and why. We examine the …rst by relating households' multistop shopping tendencies to their demographic and economic characteristics, and the second by comparing actual expenditures to those under a counterfactual one-stop scenario. The regression results indicate that multistop shopping is more prevalent among households with lower opportunity costs of time (due to unemployment or old age). Greater heterogeneity in stores'product o¤erings and higher in ‡ation-when adjusted for changes in shopping lists-are also associated with higher multistep shopping tendencies. The counterfactual analysis further shows that, for most trips, one-stop shopping would entail higher expenditures than the observed multistop trips. However, the magnitude of these savings is modest: households save between 4.7% and 11.5% of daily expenditures through multistop shopping.