Various aspects of how shoppers patronize grocery stores are regular and predictable, so much so that the pattern of buying at a particular store can be interpreted against known patterns at other stores, and against a very general model, the NBD-Dirichlet. For the grocery manager this means using scanner-panel records to assess patronage against a number of benchmark or norms. Both the substantive findings and the methodological considerations are discussed in the hope that this work will encourage further of the approach