Paper short abstract:

One of the trivial scenes of everyday life is commodity shopping in supermarkets and shopping senters. In this survey we move into the shop to study how this space forms the steps and the formalized interaction between the store service and customers. How are such shopping behavior constructed?

Paper long abstract:

In this study, customers’ movements in store areas are studied with inspiration from the work of consumer researcher Arne Dulsrud and social geographer Jon Goff. Shopping involves a formalized superficial interaction between customers and store service. Shop behavior and conversation is seen through the lenses of sociologist Erwing Goffmann’s theories of role play and sociologist Louis Wirth’s theory of impersonal urban behavior.

The empirical base of the study is current observations, photographic studies of grocery stores and supermarkets and descriptions from the (NEG) Norwegian Ethnological Research Questionnaire on shopping. The questionnaire responses provide individual and subjective descriptions of how customers experenced shopping behavior and environments in the stores.

In today’s self-service stores the sale areas are designed to get customers to move around as much as possible to be exposed to the goods. The picking of goods are a lonely act and store service is often limited to a few polite phrases. Seen in a historical context this form of shopping behavior is relatively new. The transition from counter service to self-service during 1950 to 1970 in Norway meant that customers and shop assistants had to adopt to new ways of shopping behaviour. In the traditional shops the store counter was a visual center and marked a boundary between the customers and the goods. The store staff acted as an important intermediary between customer and goods. The store staff was trained to behave within a role of formalized standard phrases and practices that the customer was internalized into.