The articles for today's class were both very interesting and packed with plenty of information. Hjelmar's article, in particular, focused on the main factors driving the process of purchasing organic food products. Two very important concepts are offered and compared: the concept of convenience behaviors and reflexive behaviors of consumers while shopping. Convenience behaviors are commonly defined as a characteristic of pragmatic consumers, or 'realistic' consumers. This type of behavior requires organic foods to be available in local supermarkets, to be clearly visible, and to be priced economically. On the other hand, reflexive behaviors are for the more politically or ethically minded consumer, those who already tend to buy more organic products. Reflexive behaviors pose questions about health, ethics, the environment, taste, etc. This behavior seems to be changing constantly, seeing that it can be sparked by different life events. Knowing the importance and definitions of these two behaviors outlines the results of this particular study. To me, the results were not so out of the ordinary; the factors leading to a person being a pragmatic consumer or ethically/politically minded consumer made sense. The following factors were of great importance to both types of consumers: efficiency, price, supply/visibility, quality, and health. However, they differed in terms of details. For efficiency, pragmatic consumers looked for quick, easy, and on the way; other consumers were willing to spend more time searching for their foods if organic was an option. Price played an enormous role (in both articles): this was a leading factor for pragmatic consumers, seeing that household economy and budgets don't always allow for organic foods. In fact, many participants stated that if both organic and conventional foods were the same price, they'd choose organic-- if not, conventional was the choice for the day. Ethically minded consumers opted for organic choices, even though they proved pricier. This was due to other factors, like health. Supply and visibility were a very important factor in the role of consumerism for the pragmatic shopper: if organic foods were not readily available or at eye level, this consumer did not go out of their way to search. This is where difficulty arises, especially in big supermarkets (where pragmatic consumers tend to shop) because conventional foods are the most readily available, at eye sight level product, while organic foods are usually stored in corners or separate aisles. To counteract this, I do believe that supermarkets should think of spreading organic products out just as they do conventional ones. Instead of consumers having to search aisles for particular organic products, they should be dispersed throughout the store.
I think that convenience shopping, or saving time, reducing effort and energy, is what most consumers strive for (definitely pragmatic ones, at least). This may not be the case in Denmark, but it most definitely is in the States. There are plenty of factors leading to convenience shopping: time, lifestyle, money, stress, etc. I am not quite sure how to change the mindsets of pragmatic, convenience shoppers-- to me, if health isn't enough, I'm not quite sure what is. I do think that education plays an enormous role in this, however. If consumers were educated on the benefits of organic foods and organic consumption, and if they knew what organic foods were in the first place, I'd like to think they would lean more towards purchasing these products. Furthermore, making organic foods more available or at least as available as conventional ones would (in my opinion) encourage buyers to stop and weigh the pros and cons of such foods-- that is if price weren't the main concern. I think a goal to strive towards should be the normalization of organic foods. In order for that to happen, it has been argued that organic foods need to be found 'at a reasonable price at first glance'; the issue then becomes how to price organic foods when their preparation takes so much more work, effort, and manual labor than that of conventional ones.
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