Urban Outshopping in Rural Slovakia

Abstract Outshopping is consumption behaviour where a consumer leaves the local economy and procures products and services in other local economies. While rural outshopping has been studied in the scientific literature for decades, the consumption structure of urban dwellers in smaller rural settlements has never been precisely mapped. The aim of this study is to understand the basic patterns of urban residents' spending on goods and services in the local economies of small rural settlements, using descriptive methods, comparison and content analysis. Based on the results, we put forward hypotheses that rural outshopping takes place within the nodal region of the city rather than in the wider urban-rural interface, may have a potentially selective character, and the frequency of short-term movement on the city-rural axis may be additional to other dominant intentions for traveling to a rural settlement.