Over the last several years, the retail industry has faced increasing pressure due to the rise of e-commerce and consumer expectations. Further, retail supply chains have faced unprecedented challenges due to the disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to shifts in consumers’ shopping behavior. An in-depth exploration of these pressures and challenges is hence warranted. The aim of this three-essay dissertation is to examine: (1) consumer behavior in retail supply chains over the recent period of change and (2) how consumers react to retail supply chain issues of shortages and stockouts. In doing so, I aim to contribute to the consumer-centric supply chain management (SCM) literature.Accordingly, in the first essay (see Chapter 2), I explore the pattern of e-commerce growth from 2010 through 2020 from a regionalized perspective. In particular, I examine whether there are different adoption patterns in urban versus rural markets and the impact of the COVID-19 shock on e-commerce growth. By employing secondary data from NielsenIQ’s Consumer Panel Dataset and applying discontinuous growth models, I find that consumers in urban areas adopted e-commerce to a greater degree and, to some extent, at a faster rate during the period of 2010 through 2019. Following the onset of the pandemic, urban areas also experienced the greatest increase in adoption of e-commerce. However, controlling for the urban and rural nature of an area, the areas that had the highest levels of e-commerce adoption prior to COVID-19 (in 2019) exhibited a smaller increase in adoption in 2020, indicating changing adoption patterns. In the second essay (see Chapter 3), I examine consumer stockpiling behavior in response to shortages of perishable products and how this behavior is moderated by household income. I explore this topic in the context of COVID-19 related issues in the meat industry in the United States (U.S.) during late spring and early summer 2020 and utilize NielsenIQ’s Consumer Panel Dataset to employ a difference-in-differences design. Overall, I find evidence that consumers do stockpile perishable products facing a scarcity, and this effect continues even after the threat of the shortage is subsiding. Additionally, lower income households stockpile to a greater degree than higher income households, indicating that income is an important boundary condition of stockpiling behavior. Lastly, in the third essay (see Chapter 4), I explore whether retailers can influence consumer reactions to stockouts by disclosing the cause of the stockout. I focus on whether disclosing different stockout causes impacts consumers’ repurchase intentions via trust in the online retailer and whether this relationship is moderated by consumer gender. I employ a series of scenario-based experiments and find that the disclosure of some stockout causes in online retail can serve as signals impacting consumer behavior, with opportunities to influence both trust and change in trust over time and subsequent repurchase intentions. This effect, however, is not moderated by the gender of the consumer.
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