Background: Many states and localities throughout the U.S. have adopted higher minimum wages. Higher labor costs among low-wage food system workers could result in higher food prices. Methods: Using a market basket of 106 foods, food prices were collected at affected chain supermarket stores in Seattle and same-chain unaffected stores in King County (n = 12 total, six per location). Prices were...

Retail sector around the world is going through a transition due to digitalization. Customers now demand convenience of online channel with instant fulfillment offline channel. As result, concept omnichannel retailing has come into existence. In retailing, both channels firm are fully or partially integrated. There many strategies that may be developed by retailers for efficient functioning ret...

The overall burden of foodborne illness is unknown, in part because of under-reporting and limited surveillance. Although the morbidity associated with foodborne illness is lower than ever, public risk perception and an increasingly complex food supply chain contribute to uncertainty in the food system. This paper presents an agent-based model of a simple food safety system involving consumers,...

Chain-stores now dominate most areas of retailing. While retailers may operate nationally or even internationally, the markets they compete in are largely local. How should they best operate pricing policy in respect of the different markets served price uniformly across the local markets or on a local basis according to market conditions? We model this by allowing local market differences, wit...

A common problem for many companies, like retail stores, it is to find sets of products that are sold together. The only source of information available is the history of sales transactional data. Common techniques of market basket analysis fail when processing huge amounts of scattered data, finding meaningless relationships. We developed a novel approach for market basket analysis based on gr...

The fast development of RFID and connective technologies is progressively changing the management of business units by introducing new challenges and appealing opportunities. In particular, promoters of connective technologies underline the abilities of these technologies to support decision making and, specifically, to increase supply chain performance. However, despite its huge potential, tec...

Supply chain management refers to all the management functions related to the flow of materials from the company’s direct suppliers to its direct customers. In this paper, we will propose a generic supply chain management system, and describe how the system works in terms of information exchange, workflow coordination and flexible logistic route. We will introduce two data models, which are cal...

In retail, assortment planning refers to selecting a subset of products to offer that maximizes profit. Assortments can be planned for a single store or a retailer with multiple chain stores where demand varies between stores. In this paper, we assume that a retailer with a multitude of stores wants to specify her offered assortment. To suit all local preferences, regionalization and store-leve...

Food industry analysts are looking closely at the long-term viability of grocery wholesalers and the independent supermarkets they supply. Growing demand for food away from home has slowed supermarket industry growth. New competitive pressures are coming from other food service providers, convenience stores, and supercenters operated by mass merchants such as Wal-Mart and Target. Many believe i...