Previous work on shopping behaviour can be catergorised into three themes. Work has been done to identify different motivations for shopping, developing the original thinking of Stone, (1954) and Tauber, (1972). Work has been done on retail patronage, examining shopping behaviour from the image promoted by retailers, building upon the original work of Matineau, (1958) and Lindquist, (1974). A third body of work, somewhat less coherent, contains a collection of different models of patronage, the most relevant here being that concerned with retail location, based on the work of Huff, (1964) and Christall and Loch, (1930) where patronage is seen to decline with distance. This thesis draws mainly from the perspective in the first theme. It takes as its starting point the concept of the individual being an allocator of time as well as money. People are seen as being motivated in their allocation of time to activities such as shopping by their time orientation. This in tum creates different attitudes to shopping which influences shopping behaviour. Previous work on time attitude and shopping behaviour has tended to emphasise solely time pressure and time saving as being linked (Berry, 1979), although others have seen time orientation as more complex (Gronmo, 1989 and Graham, 1981). A framework is developed that links attitude to time to attitude to shopping and then to actual shopping behaviour. The main contribution from the thesis is in the development and testing ofthis framework. 12 Attitudes to time are claimed to be culture specific (Graham, 1981 and Sheth and Hirshman, 1987) and so the framework is tested in two countries, Britain and Thailand. A questionnaire was developed to measure time attitude, shopping attitude and shopping behaviour in the context of food shopping. This was applied in Blackburn and Bangkok. Factor analysis is used to identify time and shopping attitudes. These are correlated with shopping behaviour specifically time spent shopping, shopping frequency, time of the day used for shopping and the patronage of individual outlets. Cluster analysis is used based upon the time and shopping factors to identify four market segments in each country. Comparisons are made between the results from each study. Although the results contain certain similarities, there are also significant differences that may be linked to differences in attitudes to time between the two countries. The main conclusion from the research is that the time perspective is useful in understanding consumer psychology and patronage behaviour. The results show that time orientation plays an important role in segmenting consumer markets. There are a number of theoretical and practical implications. The conceptualisation of time attitude being linked to patronage behaviour makes a significant contribution to marketing theory. The thesis shows that time orientation and shopping motivation are valuable dimensions in understanding consumer shopping behaviour.