The impacting factors of shopping duration on workdays in Ningbo, China

摘要

Previous studies of the shopping duration have considered the impact of sociodemographic variables and temporal constraints. In this paper, we extend the those previous studies by seeking to establish how the duration of shopping episodes varies with the variation of commercial establishment environment, travel behavior surrounding the shopping episode, shopping with other activities and the number of shoppers together. The data used are 2856 residents' shopping surveys in Ningbo of China on workdays in November 2009. The study applies cox regression models for examineing the effects of these variables on the duration of shopping episodes. The results indicate that the shopping duration is related to sociodemographic variables, temporal constraints, commercial establishment environment, travel behavior surrounding the shopping episode, shopping with other activities and the number of shoppers together. Shopping tends to take more time on workdays as the commercial establishment location is in the city central business area, the establishment business area is larger, distance from the previous to the current shopping location is longer, a person does shopping with other activities or a male person does shopping together with spouse. The effect varies, however, with the different periods of day and gender.