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Purpose Since emerging in 1983, warehouse club growth outpaced traditional grocery stores. Individual consumption in the U.S. grew concurrently. We investigate whether there is a connection between the emergence of the warehouse clubs and Americans' unparalleled consumption levels. Findings Using standard principles from microeconomics, we postulate that consumers' increasing acquisitiveness is sufficient to explain (a) why warehouse clubs have grown at a faster rate than the traditional retailers and (b) how the emergence of the warehouse club may have accelerated the growth in personal consumption. Conclusion: Warehouse clubs may have contributed to the rapid growth of Americans' consumption rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a survey on the evolution of "Marketing Science" journal as a discipline in the U.S. It mentions that the journal has grown into a large global network of scholars, vendors, and client practitioners that are proudly associated with this label. It also mentions that the journal has a scope of improvement among two tangential audiences along with the core audience including nonquantitative researchers within marketing and quantitative researchers in other fields.

Our work represents one of the first attempts to assess the impact of IT (information technology) on both process output and quality. We examine the optical character recognition and barcode sorting technologies in the mail sorting process at the United States Postal Service. Our analysis is at the application level, and thus does not involve the aggregation of IT impact over multiple processes. We use data from 46 mail processing centers over 3 years to study the IT impact. We also use a set of factors in our model to account for differences in input characteristics. Our results show that mail sorting output significantly increases with higher use of IT. In addition, IT improves quality which in turn enhances output. We also find that input characteristics exert considerable influence in determining the output and quality of the mail sorting operation. For example, while absenteeism tends to decrease output and quality due to its disruptive consequences, a higher fraction of barcoded mail seems to enhance both performance measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]