Should Costs of Travel to Buy Goods be Regarded as Transaction Costs? Within the approach of New Institutional Economics associated with Oliver Williamson and others, emphasis is placed on transaction costs as a key factor in explaining why different forms of economic organisation arise in different circumstances.  Transaction costs have been defined, eg here, as including search and information costs, bargaining and decision costs, and policing and enforcement costs.

Question: Suppose I go to a supermarket that I know well, buy branded packaged goods of kinds that I have bought many times before, and transport the goods home.  Should the cost of my travel to the supermarket and transporting the goods home, in this situation in which any elements of search, information gathering, etc are minimal, be regarded as a transaction cost?
Since it was mentioned in an another answer let's clear this first: whether the transportation (and its time and monetary costs) should be associated with the intended consumption of the good you are going to purchase, or it can be considered as consumption on its own, depends on your subjective view of it: do you derive any form of pleasure by the trip itself? If yes, at least part of it should be considered consumption per se.

The consensus among economists appears to be that most of such travel is not considered by the consumers as utility-enhancing per se (although trends like "family-shopping on Saturday" may say a different story), and so it should be interpreted in a different way. 

In the field of Industrial Organization, the good's distance from the consumer has been often treated as an aspect of product differentiation. 

You could certainly treat it as a "transaction cost", by suitably define the scope of the concept. Personally I prefer to think of it as an access cost. I hit upon this concept in a little side-research I did in hedonic-price analysis.

If you start to think about it, all packaging and transportation costs from the supplier to the shop are also "access costs" from the point of view of the consumer. They don't provide any direct utility to him -they are obligatory costs that end up increasing the price, so that the consumer is able to acquire the good and enjoy the services/utility of the good itself.

Think computers: only the materials themselves and the technology embodied in them provide utility to you (plus maybe the brand). But the price includes all shorts of overheads, like the access costs I mentioned, or marketing costs (that can be seen as information costs or as the price to pay for competition and the innovation and product variety that brings along), etc.