Within this study, “Time as an Issue in Food Shopping and Meal Preparation” will be discussed. The study begins by providing introductory information about “time” and “various research done on time”. This section offers a general overview of the literature related to “time”.

A significant amount of variance in food shopping goals and behaviour remains unexplained. Shopping goals and behaviour are related with patterns of family influence, decision making, and task assumption, or sharing, and therefore can be explained only by a detailed investigation of family structure and behaviour as it relates to meal preparation and food shopping. This research will determine, whether time-pressured consumers (e.g. employed women) do many things the same way their mothers did or whether they are highly organised in their approach to a variety of household tasks.

From the literature review, brief information about time, time orientation, time attitude of consumer, time-styles and life-styles has been obtained, in order to clarify the terms that will be used in the whole study. The main purpores of the literature review is to provide a discussion on the relationship between “time orientation”, “time perception” and the food purchase and use behaviour of consumers. “Time” will be examined as both duration and succession based in case of food purchase and meal preparation behaviour of consumers. Food purchase and meal preparation of households will be examined in detail by using the massive literature about contemporary home economics research, mainly concentrated on the increasing participation of women in the labour force.
 
 

Keywords : Time, Consumer Behavior, Food Shopping, Food Consumption.