BACKGROUND RESEARCH

 Index | The Study | Discussion | Conclusion

BACKGROUND RESEARCH

The question I am trying to solve is whether or not more people visit a particular grocery store in the middle of the day than at night.  The store at which I am conducting this study is the Giant Eagle in Rocky River.  Thus, I decided the first place I should seek information is the store itself.

            First, I inquired at customer service whether they kept any records relating to the number of customers who entered or shopped at the store in any time period.  They informed me that the only such thing they had records of was the number of purchases made per day, which does not aid me in my research.  I then decided to ask a couple of the cart attendants working that day to determine what they thought.  Both of the cart attendants I spoke with said that they believed I was correct in my thought.

            I then decided to broaden my quest for information to other Giant Eagle stores.  I visited the one in North Olmsted across form the police and bus stations.  I received similar results to what I had received at the first one, nothing of any siginificance.  Following that I took a trip to the Giant Eagle near the Fairview-North Olmsted boundary, where I again found nothing.   I saw no point in speaking with the cart attendants at either of these stores, so I took no such action.

            To broaden my search even further, I decided to drop the requirement that the store must be a Giant Eagle.  In due course, I visited Marc’s in Rocky River and the Drug Mart in North Olmsted.  At the Marc’s I was again disappointed by the lack of useful information.  The same occurred at Drug Mart.

            With the stores being relatively a dry well, I then turned to the Internet.  I decided to first look at the Giant Eagle website since I was to be doing my research at such a store.  However nothing remotely close to my question could be found.  It was then that I decided to widen my search to any and all information regarding my topic.

            I first went to the search engine Google.  My first attempt, pointless as I knew it would be, was to type in my very question.  As expected nothing came up.  I then decided to attempt an advanced search.  I did a search for the words “time” and either “customer” or “business.”  Again nothing useful came up.  I then tried to add words such as “study,” “relationship,” or “statistics” in order to prompt some kind of data on my subject.  Unfortunately, this search proved as fruitless as all of the others had been.

            I then decided to switch search engines.  So, I went to Yahoo.  I saw no point in putting in my question but I did it any way and it came up with nothing.  In response I then tried to search for any combination of the words “time,” “customers,” “business,” “data,” and anything else I could think of.  Thus much the same as Google, I gave up on Yahoo.

            With my options growing thin I then went to Ask.com.  I again tried to type in my question, and again came up with nothing.  As before, I tried to search for anything that might include “time,” “customers,” “business,” “data,” “study” and “relationship.”  Unsurprisingly, I could still find nothing of interest.

            Thus, no source of any type was capable of providing me with a precedent that I might compare my work too.  Also, it seems my question is too complex or too specific for any kind of Internet search for any related information to be practical.