Resilience of In-Store Operations during Times of Crisis

Crises influence behaviour – shopping or personal one (Boyle et al., 2022; Koos et al., 2017). Whether someone changes its behaviour during crises differentiates on an individual basis (Sheth, 2020). The more often you go for shopping, the more stable the behaviour will come (Steenkamp and Maydeu-Olivares, 2015). Furthermore, consumers can be resilient when it comes to shopping behaviour during crises, e.g. online shopping behaviour (Guthrie et al., 2021). Changes in shopping behaviour can lead to changes in the in-store environment, e.g. out-of-stock situations or increased use of self-service check-outs (Campbell et al., 2020; Sheth, 2020; Hamer, n.d.). In order to identify how resilient in-store operations are during crises, retailers should understand the shopping behaviour of their consumers (Sheth, 2020; SnapRetail, 2020). Moreover, it is of high interest for retailers to understand the procedure and the impact of all possible crises so that they are better prepared in the future. Processes and operations within the store can thus be quickly adapted to new circumstances and, for example, staff shortages or sales situations can get minimised. The in-store operations are influenced also by the frequency of shoppers. During the crises, grocery stores wanted to decrease the number of customers in the stores (Pantano et al., 2020) and crowding within the stores should be avoided. At the beginning of the crises, consumes tended to stockpill, which normalized after a time (Garbe et al., 2020). The result were empty shelves and disruption in the grocery supply chain (Liu, 2020). Therefore, this research deals with the shopping behaviour during crises and its consequences on in-store operations and focus on resilience of processes within the store. Changed and unchanged processes are included as well.