Price competition among supermarkets does not lead to price uniformity, but to a flexibility and diversity of prices aimed at enterprise differentiation, this study of weekly advertising of fourteen competing food stores shows.
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References
1.
HoldrenBob R., The Structure of a Retail Market (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1960). Chapter 1 of this monograph reviews the general literature on retail competition; the entire monograph served as a source of hypotheses and comparative results for the present study.
2.
HoltonRichard H., “Price Discrimination at Retail: The Supermarket Case,”Journal of Industrial Economics, VI (October 1957), 13–32.
3.
Such findings are reported by Holdren, note 1, Ch. 4; HirschWerner Z., “Grocery Chain Store Prices,”Journal of Marketing, XXI (July 1956); FoytikJerry, “Wholesale and Retail Grocery Margins from the 1952 OPS Survey,”Journal of Farm Economics, XL (August 1958); and NadenK. D.JacksonGeorge A., “Prices as Indicative of Competition among Retail Food Stores,”Journal of Farm Economics, XXV (May 1953).
4.
The multi-unit firms, and number of units, are as follows: Store B, 2 units; Store D, 2; Store E, 4; Store F, 2; Store K, 7; Store L, 2.
In making these computations, 193 products representing 902 price observations were excluded because they were advertised less than five times each during the survey period.
