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new methods involved the selection of the city of Cardiff as the location for the most comprehensive panel survey of urban shopping behaviour ever carried out in the U.K. As a result, a wealth of information on the retail structure of Cardiff and on the daily patterns of food and grocery shopping of its inhabitants is now available. This information not only provides a major resource for understanding the nature of urban shopping behaviour in Britain in the 1980s, and for the development and testing of a new generation of methods for retail analysis and forecasting purposes, but it also provides a base from which to assess the retail restructuring of the cities of South Wales in the 1980s; a process which is rapidly gaining momentum as the major retail corporations expand westwards into Wales from their traditional core areas in England. A FAMILY OF MODELS FOR THE ANALYSIS OF STORE CHOICE Many of the models of consumer purchasing behaviour which are used most widely in commercial research in Britain today have their origins in a period (the 1950s and early 1960s) in which power in the retailing industry lay in the hands of the manufacturers of grocery items rather than retailers. As such, the models were developed in response to the needs of the manufacturers and, consequently, focused on methods of brand-choice analysis rather than store-choice analysis. Perhaps the most famous of these models is the NBD model of consumer purchasing behaviour developed by Chatfield et al. (1966). Many properties of this model were known by the late 1950s (Ehrenberg 1959) and it has been applied extensively in commercial studies of brand purchasing for over twenty years (see Ehrenberg 1972). During that period the NBD model has progressively been generalised (e.g. Chatfield and Goodhardt 1975) to the point where it is now effectively subsumed as a special case of a more comprehensive model of consumer purchasing behaviour known as the Dirichlet model (Goodhardt et al. 1984). Although, in practice, the NBD model and its generalisations have been applied almost exclusively to the study of brand purchasing behaviour, it has long been felt that such models may have equal validity and utility as models of consumer purchasing at stores or shopping centres. Indeed, an unpublished regional-level pilot study of the fit of the NBD model to purchasing behaviour at particular store-groups in the U.K. by Jephcott (1972) prompted one researcher to speculate that "if these kinds of results can be extended it looks as though most of the present theory of brand-choice can be directly transferred to store-choice also" (Ehrenberg 1972 p. 249). In the intervening years the potential significance of this possible extension and transfer has increased. Beginning in the 1960s with the decline of resale price maintenance, and increasing in pace in the 1970s, a major shift in power has occurred in