This, combined with increasing market consolidation and the fact that logistics costs in the retail sector are higher than those in manufacturing companies, has increased the pressure on each company so that its logistics operations function efficiently. Today, many retailers operate their own logistics networks and have their own distribution centers that channel a large percentage of the products sold to the potential customer. The authors found that there was a lack of studies exploring the interdependencies between in-store operations and upstream activities in retailers' supply chains. They decided to explore these relationships through the processes used in a particular retail category, grocery stores. To conduct this study they contacted the top thirty German, top ten Austrian and top ten Swiss food retailers to seek the possibility of conducting 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 their logistics networks