Founded in $1958$ from the small beginnings of a local hardware store in southeast lowa, Farm Supply Inc. has grown into a regional retailer of $28$ stores that service the rural Midwest regions of lowa, Illinois, and Missouri. The merchandise mix of the stores includes a wide variety of items organized into $17$ departments that include everything from animal$-$related supplies to toys. This one$-$stop shopping solution for farm famllies is contained in stores that range in size from $48,000sq.$ ft$.$ to almost $60,000sq.ft.$

The marketing research process is a five$-$step application of the scientific method that includes: defining the problem, analyzing the situation, getting problem$-$specific data, interpreting the data, and solving the problem. The process requires cooperation between marketing research is to have marketing problems and marketing researchers who focus on research questions. The ultimate goal of

Over the course of the past year, the corporate office of Farm Supply has identified a significant decrease in the total number of monthly transactions in several of its stores. Specifically, transaction counts have decreased by approximately $12,000$ per month when compared to last year's data. Further review of the point of sale data determined that the average dollar amount per transaction has been estimated at $$31\mathrm{.}00.$ Consequently, the decrease in revenue due to the reduced transaction count is approximately $$372,000$ per month or slightly less than $$4\mathrm{.}5$ million per year. At the same time, the piece count per transaction has increased slightly. The incidence of non$-$purchasing store visitors is estimated at $50\%$ which represented a significant increase over previous levels. To study the problem, the Farm Supply management team conducted a basic review of secondary information to determine if possible causes of traditional customer base of "small farms." The basic review of online demographic data provided by the U$.$S$.$ Department of Census satisfactorily explain the dal data obtained from the U$.$S$.$ Department of Agriculture indicated that neither of these factors could understand the situation facreases in transactions. Store management was asked to initiate a "secret shopper" program to further forced customers to redirect their the retailer. Results of these simple interviews revealed that $1)$ merchandise stockouts may have product knowledge, or some combination ther some items and that $2)$ customer service issues related to employee apathy, lack of management defined the following research objectives:

Determine customers' perception of in$-$store customer service?

Determine the percentage of customers that leave a store prematurelvd