This, combined with the rise of market consolidation and the fact that logistics costs in the retail sector are higher than for manufacturing companies, has increased the pressure on on each company to make its logistics operations work. effectively. Today, many retailers operate their own logistics networks and have their own distribution centers that move a significant percentage of the products they sell to the end customer. The authors found that there was a lack of studies exploring the interdependencies between store operations and retailers' upstream supply chain activities. They set out to explore these relationships through the processes used in a particular retail category, grocery stores. To conduct this study, they contacted the thirty largest German, top ten Austrian and top ten Swiss food retailers for the opportunity to conduct eighty-minute semi-structured interviews with their operational managers. This interview would then be followed by a short standardized survey. After conducting twenty-eight of these interviews, the authors were able to adequately analyze the logistical networks of these