Applied Economics Letters, 2009, 16, 411415

High shopping frequency of

Vietnamese consumers: theory and
measurement
Masayoshi Maruyama* and Le Viet Trung
Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University,
2-1 Rokkodai, Nada-ku, Kobe 657-8501, Japan

Almost all Vietnamese consumers shop at least five or six times a week or
everyday or more. We formulated a basic model of the optimal level of
shopping frequency. Hanoi consumer survey data has been analysed using
the binary choice Probit model to measure factors that influence the major
characteristics related to the high-shopping frequency patterns of
Vietnamese consumers. The results consolidate the validity of the basic
model and show that freshness, convenience (distance), gender and the
presence of children in the household had a significant effect on the
frequency of shopping. In contrast, factors such as owning a refrigerator
as well as income did not have a significant effect in shaping consumer
shopping behaviour.

I. Introduction
Perceiving fresh food as being better in taste, most
Vietnamese consumers do their shopping at a high
frequency (almost everyday) in traditional bazaars in
the morning and/or the late afternoon in time to
prepare meals for that day. They usually do not buy
fresh food in bulk and the demand for frozen
products is limited. Despite the economic interest,
to the best of our knowledge, there are only a few
academic studies published relating to the consumer
behaviour (Venard, 1996; Speece and Huong, 2002;
Cadilhon et al., 2006; Maruyama and Trung,
2007a, b). The number of academic studies relating
to the typical characteristic of the high-shopping
frequency of consumers in Vietnam is very limited.
The major purpose of this study is, therefore, to
provide a basic model to analyse characteristics
and provide a measurement approach based on
quantitative consumer survey data from Hanoi,
Vietnam using the binary choice Probit model for

shopping frequently or not, to measure factors

that influence the major characteristics of the highshopping frequency of Vietnamese consumers. This
article shows that freshness, distance, gender and
the presence of children in the household had a
significant effect on the frequency of shopping.
In contrast, factors such as owning a refrigerator as
well as income and family size did not have significant
effects in shaping consumer shopping behaviour.
The analysis in this article is closely related to the
previous economic studies of shopping frequency.
Blaylock (1989) developed a constrained utility
maximization model from which testable hypotheses
were derived. Using data from a nationally representative survey of the US population, he found that
distance to grocery stores and household size had
statistically significant effects on shopping frequency.
The former had a relatively small impact while the
latter was among one of the most important factors
influencing a households shopping frequency.
Bell and Hilber (2006) examines in detail the

*Corresponding author. E-mail: mmaru@kobe-u.ac.jp

Applied Economics Letters ISSN 13504851 print/ISSN 14664291 online 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/13504850601018593

411

412
explanation posited by Salop and Stiglitz (1982) using
data from a sample of 1000 households of the US
population. Their empirical result shows that consumers with higher storage costs shop more often
and purchase smaller quantities per visit. However,
our article formulates and derives the optimal of
shopping frequency based on the minimization of
shopping cost and then investigates the validity of the
model using Hanoi consumer survey data. This is an
important difference in our analysis compared to
previous studies. The rest of this article is organized
as follows: Section II describes the shopping environment in Vietnam. Section III presents a theoretical
model. Section IV details the methodology for the
study. Section V summarizes the empirical results.
We conclude our study in Section VI.

II. Shopping Environment

Vietnams retailing industry is defined by the new
emerging retail formats and older, more traditional
retail formats. The traditional retail formats such as
organized bazaars, mom and pop stores and frog
markets satisfy more than 90% of consumer demand
(VNS, 2005; Maruyama and Trung, 2007a, b).
An organized bazaar (formal bazaar) is defined as
a market established by the local authorities. In
general, this sort of bazaar is organized with
stallholders clustered together in accordance with
their wares. Sellers of meat cluster in one area, fishes
in another area. Hanoi has more than 120 markets,
and most of them have limited and poor facilities
including water supply and waste treatment systems.
They lack storage facilities and refrigeration and do
not process fresh foods into branded goods for resale
(e.g. Maruyama and Trung, 2007a, b).
The traditional mom & pop stores are familyowned retailers that sell a limited variety of processed
food, dry goods, drinks and household supplies.
Specialized stores have emerged as well. Many streets
often specialize in a single category of products.
There are often 200300 identical mom & pop stores
along a few hundred meter stretch on a single
street. They are characterized with the sales point of
offering competitive brands within the same product
category. The sales area is nearly always very small,
often being less than 10 m2 (Maruyama and Trung,
2007a, b).
Following economic development, Hanoi has
become the prime area for the booming development
of informal bazaars called Cho Coc frog markets.
The sellers lay out their wares along streets or roads,
or outside the formal bazaars or wherever it is

M. Maruyama and L. V. Trung

convenient for customers to shop. Retailers in these
informal bazaars are mainly farmers and the poor.
They commute daily from the surrounding countryside. Because of their small scale operations, they are
always ready to move or flee from the police. The city
authorities have planned to dismantle all these
markets. In such an event, so far the local authorities
have been unable to suppress this kind of selling
activity (e.g. Gia et al., 2003; Waibel, 2004;
Maruyama and Trung, 2007a, b).
Over the past 10 years, Vietnam has experienced an
increase in the number of supermarkets, especially in
big cities such as Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) and
Hanoi. The first supermarket was a state-run enterprise opened in 1993, named Minimart in HCMC.
Hanoi got its first supermarket also named Minimart
Hanoi in March, 1995. The number of supermarkets
has been increasing rapidly from only 10 supermarkets
in 1995 to 210 supermarkets by the end of 2004
(Nhieu et al., 2005). Hanoi and HCMC, the countrys
two biggest cities, have 155 supermarkets. Foreign
chains, The French Bourbon Group, Metro Cash &
Carry, Japans Seiyu and Malaysias Parkson have all
gained a foothold in the market. Initial supermarket
successes have prompted both domestic and foreign
investors to expand their businesses in Vietnam
(Maruyama and Trung, 2007a, b).
Despite the growing market share of supermarket
chains in Vietnam, consumers still do most of their
shopping for fresh food in traditional bazaars.
It seems to be that touching, feeling, smelling the
produce seem more important than one stop, airconditioned outlets when a consumer comes to buy
fresh produce (e.g. Cadilhon et al., 2002).

III. Theoretical Model

It is reasonable to expect a link between a high
frequency of shopping for fresh food (times per week)
with freshness and proximity (distance of shopping).
However, it can be argued that a high-shopping
frequency is probably due to a lack of refrigerators in
households or due to gender, age, family size (number
of members in family) or income. Thus, it could be
that the behaviour of the Vietnamese consumers
could be explained by many historical and economical factors. The Vietnamese have lived for a long
time in a scarce economy. Facing economic shortages
over a long time, the Vietnamese have developed
quite parsimonious consumption habits (Venard,
1996). They may do their daily shopping on a day
to day basis, and buy not in bulk but in small
quantities because of limited income.

High shopping frequency of Vietnamese consumers

We formulated the following basic model for the
optimal level of shopping frequency based on some of
these above-mentioned assumptions. In general, the
higher evaluation of freshness, the less distance from
the home to the markets (more convenience), the
higher is the frequency of shopping.
Assuming that each shopper consumes a quantity q
of one kind of fresh food in a week. She goes
shopping for this item x times. We assume the
distance from her house to the market is L.
Transportation cost per unit of distance is t. Thus,
the total cost of transportation for x times will be
2tLx. The quantity for each shopping occasion is q/x.
If this quantity of fresh food is used evenly by the
shopper, the average quantity of fresh food on hand
at home will be q/2x. Assuming that the cost of
keeping on hand one unit of the product is c, the total
inventory cost at home will be cq/2x. If fresh food is
kept on hand, the freshness will diminish at a rate of
f for one unit of fresh food. Thus, the cost (disutility)
function to the shopper can be expressed with the
following function.
Ch 2tLx

cq fq

2x 2x

The shopper decides the frequency of shopping by

minimizing this function. The first-order condition
for minimization is
@Ch
2cq 2fq
2tL  2  2 0
4x
4x
@x
From this equation, we can determine the optimal
shopping frequency of shopper with the following
formula.
r
c f q
2
x
4tL
Substituting (2) into the shoppers cost (disutility)
function (1), we have
p
Ch 4c f qtL
3
Equation 2 shows that if c and f are large, t is small
or the distance from home to market is close (L is
small), the shopping frequency will increase.

413
intensively over 1 month from 1 March 2006 to
1 April 2006. We sent out questionnaires to 2000
Hanoi consumers. A total of 570 questionnaires were
returned and after eliminating incompleted questionnaires, the remaining 413 questionnaires were used
for the sample. The sample survey is biased towards
females, who are most often responsible for shopping
activity in their families. With respect to fresh food
purchasing behaviour, the data shows that over 65%
of the respondents in our sample indicated that they
often shop for fresh food in the early morning (68
am, 53%) or in the afternoon (57 pm, 12.1%, the
time that fresh food is often replenished), the time the
freshness is highest as evaluated by the respondents.
With respect to the number of times per week
shoppers go to buy fresh food, the finding is that, a
majority of the respondents (60.2%) indicated that
they shop at least five or six times a week or everyday
or more. About 22% of the respondents indicated
that they shop three to four times per week. Only
7.5% of respondents indicated that they shop twice a
week and 10.4% of respondents indicated that they
shop less than twice.
In order to investigate the validity of the basic
model presented in Section III, we divided the
respondents into two sub-groups as mentioned
above: hard shoppers or high-frequency shoppers
buying fresh food at least five times a week and
soft shoppers or low-frequency shoppers buying
less than five times a week.1 The Probit model for
binary choice (high frequency, low frequency) was
selected for the empirical analysis that follows.
Binary choice for shopping frequency (number of
shopping occasions per week) for each consumer was
treated as an individual observation, Yi taking the
value 1 if a consumer was a hard shopper and 0 if a
consumer was a soft shopper. Explanatory variables
and the sample statistics included in the Probit
model are presented in Table 1. We estimated the
contribution of each of explanatory variables to
overall goodness of the binomial Probit model. Thus,
y is modelled directly as the dependent variable in a
model incorporating the function specification of the
form:
PYi 1 Gx

IV. Data and Methodology

To obtain information on the consumers shopping
frequency, we conducted a detailed consumer survey

where G is the standard normal cumulative distribution function, x is the full set of explanatory variables
that are expected to influence each choice and  is set
of parameters to be estimated by maximum likelihood estimation (Maddala, 1997).

We classified these consumers into two groups on the basis of discussions with some experienced Vietnamese consumers.

M. Maruyama and L. V. Trung

414
Table 1. Variable definition and sample statistics
Variable
FRESH
DISTANCE
REFRI
SEX
CHILD
AGE
INCOME
FAMILY

Definition
a

What is your importance rating for the factor of freshness? (From 1 to 5)

Not important at all 1, very important 5
How far is it from your house to the outlets for fresh food? (From 1 to 5)
Less than 200 m 1, 200 m1 km 2, 12 km 3, 25 km 4, more than 5 km 5
Does your family have a refrigerator?
Yes 1, otherwise 0
Female 0, Male 1
Does your family have any children below 6 years-of-age?
Yes 1, otherwise 0
Age of the respondent
Less than 30 1, between 30 and 40 2, more than 40 3
Average monthly income per person in your family in Vietnamese dong (VND)
500 000 to 1.5 million 1, 1.52.5 million 2, more than 2.5 million 3
Total number of members in the family (continuous variable)

Mean

SD

4.29

1.04

1.98

0.90

0.92

0.26

0.15
0.40

0.36
0.49

1.74

0.80

1.73

0.75

3.89

0.75

Note: aNot important at all 1, not really important 2, important 3, quite important 4, very important 5.

Table 2. Regression result and marginal effect

Variable

Coefficient

FRESH
DISTANCE
REFRI
SEX
CHILD
AGE
INCOME
FAMILY
CONSTANT
Log likelihood
Number of observations
LR 2 (7)
Prob > 2
Pseudo R2
Percent correctly predicted

0.18***
0.30***
0.28
0.74***
0.39***
0.18**
0.07
0.05
0.13
244.11
413
66.7
0.0000
0.12
83.94

Marginal
probability
0.07
0.11
0.10
0.29
0.15
0.07
0.03
0.02

Note: *** and ** indicate coefficients are significant at the

0.01 and 0.05 levels, respectively.

V. Empirical Results
The coefficients of the Probit model were estimated
using Stata (V9.0) and the results are reported in
Table 2. The Chi-square test statistic, pseudo R2 and
percent correctly predicted showed the model is
significant.
Positive and significant coefficients for FRESH
imply that it is highly probable that consumer
shopping frequency will be higher if he/she rates
freshness at a high level of importance. CHILD was
significantly positive, with relatively large marginal
2

effect (equal to 15.75%) suggesting that the respondents who have children under 6-years-old in their
family would likely go to buy fresh food more
frequently. This is intuitively true since respondents
who have children less than 6-years-old in their
family tend to be more interested in freshness,
perceiving more freshness as being more delicious
and nutritious and safer for the growth of their
children so that they would go shopping more
frequently. AGE had a significantly positive effect,
suggesting that older respondents would likely go
more frequently. A negative and significant coefficient for DISTANCE implies that lower the distance
(more convenience), higher the shopping frequency
for fresh food. It is interesting to note that the
marginal effect of DISTANCE (equal to 11%) is
much larger than that of FRESH (equal to 7%),
suggesting that DISTANCE is likely to play a more
important role in shaping consumer daily shopping
habits than FRESH. Negative and significant coefficient for SEX implies that female consumers would
be more likely to shop more often than male
consumers. Impressively, REFRI, INCOME and
FAMILY did not have a significant effect in shaping
consumer shopping frequency. Intuitively, Hanoi
consumers in our study did not consider refrigerated
fresh produce (such as meat, fish, or vegetables)
with freshness. On the contrary, they reasoned that if
the product was cold when they touch it, this meant
that the food had been in a refrigerator and thus
it had been stored for some period of time.
Accordingly, products stored in refrigerators were
not considered fresh by Hanoi consumers.2

This intuitive explanation was derived from the interviews with Vietnamese consumers.

High shopping frequency of Vietnamese consumers

VI. Summary and Conclusion
We formulated the basic model of the optimal level
of shopping frequency based on the minimization of
shopping cost. In general, the higher evaluation of
freshness, the less distance from the home to the
markets (more convenience), the higher is the
frequency of shopping. The validity of the model
was investigated via the empirical analysis and
highly accepted. Although conventional wisdom
suggests that high-shopping frequency is due to the
low income or the lack of refrigerator, we conclude
that owning a refrigerator as well as income
and family size did not have a significant effect in
shaping high-shopping frequency of Vietnamese
consumers.

References
Blaylock, J. R. (1989) An economic model of grocery
shopping frequency, Applied Economics, 21, 84352.
Bell, D. R. and Hilber, C. A. L. (2006) An empirical test of
the theory of sales: do household storage costs affect
consumer and store behavior?, Quantitative Marketing
and Economics, 4, 87117.
Cadilhon, J. J., Fearne, A. P., Moustier, P. and Poole,
N. D. (2002) Changes in the organisation of food
marketing systems in South East Asia: a preliminary
assessment, in Culture and Collaboration in Distribution
Networks (Ed.) P. J. Batt, available online at: http://
www.impgroup.org/papers (accessed 1 April 2006).
Cadilhon, J. J., Moustier, P., Poole, N. D., Tam, P. T. G.
and Fearne, A. P. (2006) Traditional vs. modern

415
food systems? Insights from vegetable supply chains to
Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Development Policy
Review, 21, 3149.
Gia, B. T., Cuong, T. M., Tru, N. A. and Huong, T. T. T.
(2003) Vegetable Retail Marketing in Hanoi Province,
VEGSYS: Research Project Report No. PRIZ.
Maddala, G. S. (1997) Limited Dependent and Qualitative
Variables in Econometrics, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Maruyama, M. and Trung, L. V. (2007a) Supermarkets in
Vietnam: opportunities and obstacles, Asian Economic
Journal, 21, 1946.
Maruyama, M. and Trung, L. V. (2007b) Traditional
bazaar or supermarkets: a probit analysis of affluent
consumer perceptions in Hanoi, International Review
of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, 17,
23352.
Nhieu, N. T., Hung, N. V., Cai, P. T., Thin,
P. H. and
?
`
Hien, T. T. T.
0 (2005) Thu_? c Tra_ ng Va Giai Phap Phat
Trie n He: Tho ng Sieu Thi O Nuoc Ta Trong Giai Doan
_
_
Hie: n Nay Real State and Methods for Developing
Supermarket System in Vietnam (in Vietnamese),
Ministry of Trade, Hanoi.
Salop, S. and Stiglitz, J. E. (1982) The theory of sales: a
simple model of equilibrium price dispersion with
identical agents, American Economic Review, 72,
112130.
Speece, M. W. and Huong, L. T. T. (2002) Attitudes of
mini-supermarket shoppers in Hanoi, Vietnam: a case
study in the early development of modern retailing,
Journal of Korean Academy of Marketing Science, 10,
187212.
Venard, B. (1996) Vietnamese distribution channels,
International Journal of Retail & Distribution
Management, 24, 2940.
Vietnam News (VNS) (2005) Supermarkets expect fierce
competition, Vietnam News, 1 July.
Waibel, M. (2004) The ancient quarter of Hanoi a reflection of urban transition processes, ASIEN, 92, 3048.
?