Investigation of older consumers’ overall shopping experience in the UK

Abstract

The population of the world is ageing. It has been forecasted that, by 2050, 34% of the UK population will be aged over 60 in 2050. Due to such a dramatic demographic trend, many researchers have been devoted to improve the quality of older people’s life from multiple perspectives, such as health and social care, social policy, pension, service design. Although results from the existing research are notable, very few studies that have deeply investigated older consumers’ shopping experience in supermarkets. Therefore, this proposed project aimed to investigate challenges and difficulties that older consumers face during their supermarket shopping process, and in turn to understand the way in which supermarket service and environment design can improve older consumers’ shopping experience in the UK. Focus groups, ethnographic user studies which include a Culture Probes information-gathering package, video-based direct observation and in-depth interviews will be conducted in the regions of West Somerset, South Shropshire and Berwick-upon-Tweed to investigate the UK older customers’ overall shopping experience and identify challenges that they face during their shopping process. These three regions have been selected because they have a comparatively high proportion of people aged 65 and over in the UK. Four focus groups with 22 older consumers have been conducted to investigate key elements, which influence their shopping behaviour and experience. Subsequently, 10 elderly consumers from each region will be invited to participate in the ethnographic user studies within a two-month period, which supports the researcher to discover shopping related issues with older customers.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Yuanyuan Yin: orcid.org/0000-0002-2109-0135

ORCID for Ashok Ranchhod: orcid.org/0000-0003-4269-8825

ORCID for Maria Evandrou: orcid.org/0000-0002-2115-9358

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