Laval University is going to school, literally, on what it takes to make it in the grocery business with plans to open the first "supermarket school" in North America.
The store, as proposed by the school located in Canada's Quebec City, is intended, among other things, to enable researchers to conduct studies on a wide variety of issues affecting supermarkets in a working environment.
A number of Canada's leading grocery chains, including Sobey's and Loblaw, plan to invest in the school/store.
"This will certainly be something out of the ordinary for a university campus, where people aren't used to seeing a real-time laboratory," Jean-Claude Dufour, a marketing professor at Laval, told the Globe and Mail.
"It's unique," said Mr. Dufour. "It will be a state-of-the-art facility with the ability to accommodate all the latest electronics, computers, satellites, and do research in everything from high-tech shopping carts and cash registers to consumer psychology and retail-management."
Paul Paquin, vice-dean of research at Laval's faculty of agriculture and food sciences, said the new program is a perfect complement to existing programs at the school. "We already have farms, greenhouses and an experimental food-processing plant, so a food distributor is an additional piece that fits in nicely with the platform," he said.
Discussion Questions: What types of research that could be conducted in Laval University's supermarket school would be most helpful to actual store operators? Are there universities involved in consumer and/or retail research that have consistently produced studies with real world applications?