Addressing the Challenges of Supplying People with Daily Consumer Goods in Rural Areas

The project “Active Ageing” identified several difficulties and challenges of proper goods supply in rural areas. In this paper we present the follow-up project “GreisslerPLUS”, which tries to overcome the difficulties of a proper supply of daily goods in rural areas. The trend of daily good supply is heading towards larger grocery companies which are mostly located in areas settling larger communities. Such grocery companies often provide a wider range of goods, they have higher budgets for advertising, and they are mostly able to offer similar goods with lower prices. As a consequence, local suppliers cannot keep up with those offers and, therefore, they have difficulties to survive. In particular, elder and less mobile people suffer from this situation. Because of longer transport distances they need to ask others for help. Thus, they will lose their opportunity to care for themselves. The project GreisslerPLUS intends to counter this trend and to find solutions. We describe the survey about daily consumer habits in the area “Schneebergland” and explain models we designed based on the survey evaluation.