Weather effects on consumer variety-seeking

Variety-seeking, as a kind of pervasive consumer behaviour, has been studied extensively. While much of the prior research has examined the effects of individual factors on consumer variety-seeking, how external conditions, in particular weather, may influence this behaviour has not been considered. Weather profoundly affects people's daily life. Emerging studies have verified the effects of weather on the sales of department stores. This paper investigates how weather affects consumers' variety-seeking using over seven hundred thousand records of supermarket panel data. Our analyses show that bad weather (i.e., less sunlight) and higher temperature conditions both could increase variety-seeking behaviour. In addition, in these weather conditions, females and younger consumers show higher variety-seeking tendency than males, older consumers. Implications for research and practice are discussed.