Discussion

    Weaknesses of the study mainly pertain to the dates in which we collected our data.  We collected our data on two different Sundays and two different Mondays.  Also, the earliest Monday in which we collected data was a day following the holiday of Easter.  These dates act as weaknesses because on different days of the week, Giant Eagle may have a different amount of customers.  One confounding variable of our study is the actual population of all Giant Eagle shoppers.  There were clearly more females than males in the store during the times when we collected our data.  The fact that more females were present, means that the counts for females who pass through the self-checkout lines would be greater than the counts for males.  We could have stood in the front of the Giant Eagle store and counted the total number of males and females that actually entered the store.  We then could have compared the proportion of males and females who actually went through the self-checkout line to the proportion of males and females who entered Giant Eagle.  We do not feel comfortable with extrapolating our results very far.  We feel as if our results could be extrapolated out to the population of Giant Eagle shoppers in Northeast Ohio who use the self-checkout line.  We would not want to extrapolate any further because other areas would be more or less populous.  Also, other Giant Eagle stores may be larger or smaller, therefore, holding more or less customers.  Giant Eagle also may not be the grocery store of choice in many areas, especially  those that lack a Giant Eagle store.  We do suggest further work in our study area.  We suggest that Giant Eagle and other grocery stores collect this data.  They may do this by requiring customers, who pay at the self-checkout line, to check off a gender option given by the line’s computers.  The computers could then sort the data by gender in order for comparison.  This study would not take counts by gender according to a ten minute time interval, but just as an overall count.