Understanding Agendas of Unmanned Stores: The Case of South Korea

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to find the overall issues of unmanned stores from the media in South Korea. For analysis, 5,261 online news articles published between 2018 to 2021 were collected. As an overview, we analyzed the annual word frequency. The results showed emerging terms related to the COVID-19 after 2020. Then, latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling analysis was conducted to explore the agendas of unmanned stores, and as a result, 12 topics were derived. The results showed that most topics focused on the various types of unmanned stores including specific franchise brand names. In addition, as a structural aspect of the unmanned store field, agendas such as business prospects, major countries, and leading companies in unmanned stores were derived. Furthermore, social issues such as the spread of COVID-19 and crime cases were found. The results of this study provide an understanding of the various agendas related to unmanned stores. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.