Consumer behavior

"Automated driving technologies are currently penetrating the market, and the coming fully autonomous cars will have far-reaching, yet largely unknown, implications. A critical unknown is the impact on traveler behavior, which in turn impacts sustainability, the economy, and well-being. Most behavioral studies, to date, either focus on safety and human factors (driving simulators; test beds), assume travel behavior implications (microsimulators; network analysis), or ask about hypothetical scenarios that are unfamiliar to the subjects (stated preference studies). Here we present a different approach, which is to use a naturalistic experiment to project people into a world of self-driving cars. We mimic potential life with a privately-owned self-driving vehicle by providing 60 h of free chauffeur service for each participating household for use within a 7-day period. We seek to understand the changes in travel behavior as the subjects adjust their travel and activities during the chauffeur week when, as in a self-driving vehicle, they are explicitly relieved of the driving task. In this first pilot application, our sample consisted of 13 subjects from the San Francisco Bay area, drawn from three cohorts: millennials, families, and retirees. We tracked each subject’s travel for 3 weeks (the chauffeur week, 1 week before and 1 week after) and conducted surveys and interviews. During the chauffeur week, we observed sizable increases in vehicle-miles traveled and number of trips, with a more pronounced increase in trips made in the evening and for longer distances and a substantial proportion of “zero-occupancy” vehicle-miles traveled."

"Ride-sharing services are transforming urban mobility by providing timely and convenient transportation to anybody, anywhere, and anytime. These services present enormous potential for positive societal impacts with respect to pollution, energy consumption, congestion, etc."

"This article intends to advance future research about the travel behavior impacts of SAVs, by identifying the characteristics of users who are likely to adopt SAV services and by eliciting willingness to pay measures for service attributes. The results show that service attributes including travel cost, travel time and waiting time may be critical determinants of the use of SAVs and the acceptance of DRS. Differences in willingness to pay for service attributes indicate that SAVs with DRS and SAVs without DRS are perceived as two distinct mobility options. The results imply that the adoption of SAVs may differ across cohorts, whereby young individuals and individuals with multimodal travel patterns may be more likely to adopt SAVs."

Amazon agreed to buy the upscale grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.4 billion, in a deal that will instantly transform the company that pioneered online shopping into a merchant with physical outposts in hundreds of neighborhoods across the country.

The presentation includes the macro trend of e-commerce, investment overview, emerging trends in e-commerce, and the future predictive.

Meal-delivery companies are the ultimate symbol of the most powerful force in business today: convenience maximalism. But it comes with ethical, ecological, and economic costs.

Most of today’s retailers and their supply chain advisors understand the shift in retail sales to the online channel but, for many years, the inclusion of gasoline, groceries, and automobile sales in U.S. retail sales numbers masked the true extent of eCommerce penetration. This is a blog summary of a longer report.

Nordstrom has officially opened its first store without inventory, testing a new format for the department store chain called Nordstrom Local.

The luxury industry has entered a “new normal,” characterized by lower growth. To succeed in the next decade, brands will need to refocus on their customers to better anticipate and cater to their needs.

"As e-commerce grows as a percentage of total retail sales, consumers are choosing delivery options with shorter delivery cycles. Not only does this mean that Amazon Prime customers (65 million subscribers in September 2016) can choose Prime Now two-hour deliveries for some high-volume items, it means other retailers are offering same-day deliveries, as are some package delivery companies (United Parcel Service [UPS], Federal Express [FedEx], and United States Postal Service [USPS]) in certain cities. This report reviews how express delivery services now operate, how they are regulated, and how they may affect the state’s transportation system."

This article discusses about the cost of AV per mile compared to SOVs and looks into AV peak demand and surge pricing.

This article lays out the share of the market Amazon versus its competitors hold and the impacts its growth is having.

A year ago, electric rental scooters were hailed as the next big thing in transportation. But their troubles in San Diego show how the services have now hit growing pains.

This article looks at how "retailers are honing their distribution center strategy to meet current e-commerce demands.

"This paper presents findings from a comprehensive travel and residential survey deployed in seven major U.S. cities, in two phases from 2014 to 2016, with a targeted, representative sample of their urban and suburban populations. The purpose of this report is to provide early insight on the adoption of, use, and travel behavior impacts of ride-hailing. The report is structured around three primary topics, key findings of which are highlighted below."

The aim of this paper is to make an overview of the business models of the companies developing AVs for Last-Mile Delivery (LMD) of goods and to find out what is the attitudes of the online customers towards using AVs for delivery of their goods.

This article mentions the visible downfall of malls and large stores like Sears and Toys R Us, but it highlights how these stores have impacted individuals and their stories from growing up visiting them.

Food delivery apps are reshaping the restaurant industry—and how we eat—by inspiring digital-only establishments that don’t need a dining room or waiters.

A summary of retail job gain and loss through the different industries.

Amazon's physical retail strategy is coming into focus, and just like the company's e-commerce business, it's focused on convenience. Perhaps the best way to make things more convenient for customers is to shorten the time it takes for them to complete a shopping trip.

Like most other industries, transportation and logistics (T&L) is currently confronting immense change; and like all change, this brings both risk and opportunity. New technology, new market entrants, new customer expectations, and new business models. In this paper we discuss four key areas of disruption logistics companies need to focus on now, and explore some possible futures of the industry.

Uber Eats will now deliver food to customers in the most unexpected of places—restaurants. The food delivery and pick-up app's "Dine-in" feature is now being pilot-tested in Dallas, Austin, Phoenix and San Diego, according to an Uber spokesperson.

In theory, e-commerce can be greener than a bunch of shoppers making personal trips in their own cars: Consolidating products and delivering them on one route to a bunch of homes requires fewer miles on the road. However, that calculus changes significantly if items are coming from further away and have to be sent immediately, which creates fewer opportunities for lumping deliveries together.

The quintessential college experience of getting pizza delivered to your dorm room is about to get a high-tech upgrade. Starship Technologies announced its plan to deploy thousands of its autonomous six-wheeled delivery robots on college campuses around the country over the next two years.

Traffic at the airports—even before you get inside—has gotten worse. The cause is not just the record number of travelers. It’s also the shift to ride sharing.

As e-commerce sales march ahead of in-store sales, the major issue discussed at the Retail Industry Leaders Association’s (RILA) Retail Supply Chain Conference: Logistics 2013 was best practices for developing and executing an omni-channel distribution strategy. And real estate—particularly distribution centers (DCs)—is a significant part of the process. This article reviews the main questions asked during the conference.

A press briefing on the results of an international study aimed to ascertain consumer perspective for self-driving cars.

At 92 million strong, millennials are an economic and demographic powerhouse. They’re also different from every preceding generation since they’ve grown up with personal computers and smartphones. They’re used to a connected world in which information, goods and services are readily available at the click of a button. This millennial mindset is shaping how the tenants of tomorrow are looking for space to live, work and shop and what they expect. In this whitepaper we break down the three most important millennial trends and what they mean for commercial real estate.

The sharing economy and on-demand services are weaving their way into the lives of (some) Americans, raising difficult issues around jobs, regulation and the potential emergence of a new digital divide. This report offers a detailed examination of three different services that exemplify the shared, collaborative and on-demand economy: ride-hailing apps, home-sharing platforms and crowdfunding services.

"In this chapter I address three commonly misunderstood aspects of vehicle automation: capability, deployment, and connectivity. For each, I identify a myth pervading public discussion, provide a contradictory view common among experts, explain why that expert view is itself incomplete, and finally discuss the legal implications of this nuance. Although there are many more aspects that merit clarification, these three are linked because they suggest a shift in transportation from a product model to a service model, a point with which I conclude."

“Zombie malls,” as they are known, are increasingly dotting the suburban landscape. The lights are on, the escalators keep moving, but their purpose in life has gone. Burlington Center has less than 20 tenants — including a Sears and a Foot Locker — but once had more than 100.

As retail went digital, the idea was, physical space would become redundant. But while pivoting to a new digital paradigm hasn’t been easy, the retail industry’s ability to adapt has been notable and impressive. In fact, as cities grow and new hordes of consumers flock to establish themselves in urban communities, opportunities for innovation are emerging that suggest brick-and-mortar may be the pillar of a new retail era." This article primarily talks about the urbanization and the consumer, and the rebirth of brick-and-mortar.

While the U.S. online food-delivery market continues to burn hot, data from KeyBanc suggests growth in restaurants offering the service may be slowing. That could limit the whole sector’s long-term growth, as restaurant selection is key to consumer adoption of delivery apps.

On Thursday, five years after launching and two and half years after being acquired by Ford for a reported $65 million, the app-based shuttle service announced it is rolling to a permanent stop. Transportation technology companies have never been sexier than in the past decade, but this stumble is a potent reminder that creating a profitable transportation business can be far harder than it seems.

It’s nothing short of a revolution, and the stakes have never been higher for retailers and consumer goods companies. Our Total Retail survey results, together with 2015 fourth-quarter retail results around the world, point to 2016 as a watershed for many of the trends that have been percolating over the past few years. From the unmistakable desire to be a member of a specialized retail community to buying more on their mobile phones, from becoming more reliant on social media to demanding a more service-focused and knowledgeable store employee, global consumers are pushing the boundaries of what shopping means.

Ever since Amazon began selling books online in 1995, retailers — and plenty of other commentators — have been asking what role, if any, physical stores might play in the retail arena. Some have gone so far as to predict the ultimate demise of stores, and others expound the virtues of various hybrid omnichannel solutions. This report explores where things stand in retail in 2017.

This article explores the different ways retailers might engage with their customers in the future as we shift into an evermore digital-physical hybrid world.

This report aims to pull back Amazon’s cloak of invisibility, it shows how the company’s tightening grip is stifling competition, eroding jobs, and threatening communities - it presents new data; draws on interviews with dozens of manufacturers, retailers, and others; and synthesizes a broad body of previous reporting and scholarship.

We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history. By 2030, within 10 years of regulatory approval of autonomous vehicles (AVs), 95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals, in a new business model we call “transportas-a-service” (TaaS). The TaaS disruption will have enormous implications across the transportation and oil industries, decimating entire portions of their value chains, causing oil demand and prices to plummet, and destroying trillions of dollars in investor value — but also creating trillions of dollars in new business opportunities, consumer surplus and GDP growth.

Autonomous vehicles use sensing and communication technologies to navigate safely and efficiently with little or no input from the driver. These driverless technologies will create an unprecedented revolution in how people move, and policymakers will need appropriate tools to plan for and analyze the large impacts of novel navigation systems. In this paper we derive semi-parametric estimates of the willingness to pay for automation. We use data from a nationwide online panel of 1,260 individuals who answered a vehicle-purchase discrete choice experiment focused on energy efficiency and autonomous features. Several models were estimated with the choice micro-data, including a conditional logit with deterministic consumer heterogeneity, a parametric random parameter logit, and a semi-parametric random parameter logit.

As ride hailing and ride sharing grow more common, a new survey offers insights into shifting attitudes and behavior.

We are long past the point of discussing how technology has interrupted our lives and changed our perspective of the world. We are now in the post-disruption era, and in many sectors including retail, a new normal is emerging. We are seeing that the most successful retailers are using both online and offline approaches. The key is the critical balance between the efficiency of online with the engagement of offline.

Ford and other companies say the industry overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles, which still struggle to anticipate what other drivers and pedestrians will do.

A year after shutting all its U.S. stores, Toys R Us is making a comeback. The international chain, which filed for bankruptcy in 2017, is opening two mall stores this holiday season and bringing back its website. But don’t expect the Toys R Us you’re used to. 'We’re reinventing Toys R Us to make it fun and interactive for kids and parents.'

Smart Mobility 2030 ITS strategic Plan for Singapore

Summary of consumer expenditure data including the expenditures and income of consumers, as well as the demographic characteristics of those consumers.

This web page presents a 2016 overview of the U.S. retail industry and all relevant information, facts, research, data and trivia related to the U.S. retail industry. It provides the definition of the U.S. retail industry, the size of the U.S. retail industry, and the types of retailing and retailers that comprise the U.S. retail industry. Also provides links to the most current info, facts, research, data, and trivia about the largest U.S. retail chains.