Food Outshopping in Remote Rural Areas of Italy: Lessons from a Natural Experiment

Abstract The increasing number of supermarkets and hypermarkets poses a risk to the survival of small local shops in rural areas. As a result, people living in remote areas might need to travel several kilometers to obtain food, and this can create objective difficulties for those who do not drive or cannot afford the cost of owning a car. This study uses a natural experiment to analyze outshopping practices in Italian remote areas using the database of the multipurpose survey on Italian families carried out by Italian National Institute of Statistics. For this study, we used the COVID-19 lockdown as a state of nature when long-range shopping trips were less frequent, and we compared it with the pre-COVID-19 habits, in order to identify changes in consumption and shopping behavior. Our study is the first to explore outshopping behaviors in remote areas of Italy, offering original insights into food access and healthy eating where research is currently lacking. We performed a difference-in-difference analysis, comparing remote areas with other areas in Italy, to highlight the effect of outshopping in remote areas. Our results show how a considerable share of consumer food expenditure is paid to firms outside the local area, supporting the hypothesis of financial resources shift from the local business to large retailers. Moreover, we found limited food access and diet issues in Italian internal areas when outshopping practices are constrained.