ABSTRACT
Some twenty years ago the Journal of Marketing published an article by Edward Tauber entitled 'Why do people Shop?', which hypothesised that shopping trips were not always related to the purchase of goods, and that a number of other social and personal motives account for shopping behaviour. This article is an updated replication of Tauber's study but was conducted under an explicitly different set of metatheoretical assumptions from those implicit in Tauber's 1972 piece. Tauber's basic findings are corroborated but significantly developed in this replication, which is grounded on constructionist rather than positivistic assumptions. Accordingly, motives are defined not as internalised states but as descriptive or ascriptive accounts of some contextualised act, expressed in terms of prefigurative or practical logical force.
