Globalisation and its impact on the creation of sustainable points of purchase

Abstract

In the second half of the 1990s, important global traders began to come to the Slovak market, changing the functional layout of the towns and cities by building large-scale stores, bringing new formats and forms of selling to retails, as well as thoughtful external and internal shop designs. More than twenty years have passed since then, however, internationalmarketers continue to shape the Slovak retail market, this time through a sustainable architecture of shops and logistics centres, responsible product assortments, reduced food waste, separating and reducing paper or plastic packaging and batteries, changing the employees´ clothing for garments from organic cottons, and so on. They have namely realized that the environment is more affected than protected as a result of globalization, and it is therefore necessary to take measures to protect the natural world with regard to permanently sustainable principles. The object of our research is the shopping setting in retail stores of selected worldwide retail chains operating in Slovakia, i.e. all elements of the retail shop and its operation (its design, layout, goods presentation, staff and customers), in the context of sustainability. We are looking for answers to the questions of which selected global retail chain stores working in Slovakia and by implementing of which specific measures they build sustainable points of sale. In the process of elaborating the paper we used as sources of information relevant publications, proceedings of scholarly papers, as well as studies available at the Internet sites of specialized journals. At elaborating the sources, we applied standard scientific methods: researching, description, analysis, and deduction.