How Do Consumers Perceive the Overall Price-Level of a Grocery Store? — An Exploratory Field Study

This paper presents an exploratory field study on consumers' store price perceptions — a phenomenon that hitherto has received little attention within marketing research. In the study, consumers' perceptions of the price levels of grocery stores are compared to the actual price levels in these stores. The results indicate that the correspondence between actual and perceived prices, on average, is fairly good, although the variance in price estimation accuracy as well as price perception on the individual consumer level is large.