Shop Space Research Articles

Understanding older shoppers: a phenomenological investigation

PurposeThis research aims to explore the shopping behaviour and needs and wants of the over 55s market. Retail spaces have been most concerned with targeting the young, but the growing importance of the older segment now dictates that retail environments must increasingly communicate with older shoppers.Design/methodology/approachSemi‐structured interviews were conducted with senior executives from the retail property industry. Focus groups were conducted with older shoppers to explore their perceived needs and wants.FindingsKey findings include the need to use “perceived age” rather than chronological age in determining marketing strategies. The importance of shopping as a means of socialisation and a leisure pursuit was emphasised by older consumers and that they see themselves as experienced, astute shoppers who seek quality and service.Research limitations/implicationsThe heterogeneity of the mature market was highlighted; outlook and lifestyles of older consumers are likely to continue to change with successive generations. This indicates the need for continued research in this field to fully understand the needs and wants of a diverse and important market segment.Practical implicationsFindings are evaluated in the context of previous research to draw out implications and potential actions points for the retail and shopping place industry, specifically to create aspirational shopping spaces for older shoppers and use targeted brand management to communicate effectively.Originality/valueThe paper provides insights into the needs and wants of older shoppers and highlights that while this group values the shopping environment for social and leisure usage, retailers and shopping places needs to better understand and tailor their offer to benefit from the growing importance of the older shopper.

Immigrant Grocery-Shopping Behavior: Ethnic Identity versus Accessibility

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate in the ‘new’ economic geography over the dialectic between the cultural and the economic, and in which the study of the geography of consumption is a prime example. The consumer behavior of culturally distinct immigrants is an intriguing and complex economic and cultural inquiry. In this paper we explore the grocery-shopping behavior of suburban middle-class Chinese immigrants in Toronto, where the group's ethnic economy has become full-fledged. Using a mixed approach combining focus groups and logistic modeling, we examine the preferences of Chinese immigrants between the fast-growing Chinese supermarkets and competing mainstream supermarket chains. Attention is focused upon the interplay of ethnic identity and accessibility in determining store patronage. The findings suggest a stronger effect of ethnic affinity on immigrants' choice of shopping venue than that of economic rationality. Grocery shopping, a most mundane and taken-for-granted activity, is practiced with sociocultural meanings by immigrants, and the social use of ethnic shopping spaces indicates that immigrants are not only consumers in ethnic shopping places but coactors in producing the unique ethnic retail environment.

韓国密陽・三浪津邑における駅前商店街の形成と居住空間変容に関する考察

This paper aims to clarify spatial formation of the previous Japanese residential district and transformation of shop House in shopping district at the front of station in the Samrangjin village of Milyang city (KOREA). Shopping district area was shaped on the parallel line along the railroad. In this research, we clarify formation process and spatial pattern of Shop house in the Samrangjin. As the result of this study, we found that the characteristics of street construction and arrangement of Shop house and transformation of living space by Korean living style. Transformation of living space is caused firstly by appearance of 'ROJI', 'MADANG'. Division of Living space and Shop space are affected by the positional at of 'ROJI', 'MADANG', and linked also with transformation of circulation. In this study we found out the composite formation of Japanese living style and Korean living style.

Robust Inference for Measures of Persistence in Singapore Sectoral Property Price Indexes

This paper examines the pattern and persistence of changes in price indexes of Singapore private housing, office space, shop space and industrial properties. Unit root tests find convincing evidence of non‐stationarity in all four sectors' quarterly prices. However, more detailed analysis of the autoregressive coefficient estimate, using recently developed methods that are robust to near unit‐root possibilities, reveals clear differences between residential and the non‐residential property price indexes. Three distinct types of dynamic behaviour can be discerned, characterized by the shape of the empirical impulse response function. Only private residential prices are clearly non‐stationary. For shop space, a stationary model is indicated, while the remaining two categories – namely office space and industrial property – are more likely to be near‐unit root processes depicting a high degree of persistence. Further analysis reveals hump‐shaped empirical impulse responses in the office space and industrial property price series.

Tourists and residents use of a shopping space

In many communities tourists and residents share shopping spaces. These common areas offer a setting for understanding how the host and guest populations utilize and perceive a leisure locale at one point in the tourism lifecycle. An investigation of tourists and residents of a US city explored the use of and attitudes towards the traditional shopping district. Four segments were developed based on whether the consumer was a tourist or a local and whether this person was a heavy or light user of the shopping place. Findings demonstrate that information from these four groups enhances understanding of tourism lifecycle models.

Shopping, Space, and Practice

In this paper we address questions of ‘shopping as practised’ and its relation to shopping space. We argue that modes of shopping, which comprise distinctive sets of shopping practices involving relations to goods (purchases), relations of looking (and seeing), the place of shopping in the rhythms of everyday life, and the socialities of shopping, are used to invest meaning in particular types of shopping space and to produce individual, accumulated, personalised shopping geographies that weave together particular locations and generic spaces. Furthermore, modes of shopping are shown to require specific sets of knowledge to practise and to relate to specific subject positions, namely necessity and choice. These arguments are developed in relation to charity shops and charity shopping. However, they are shown to have broader implications: specifically they show the relationality of modes of shopping and shopping spaces, and the distinctions between shopping geographies and retail geographies. Theoretically, they suggest that accounts of shopping need to locate meaning in practice; that the meanings of shopping (and the meanings invested in particular shopping spaces) are therefore potentially unstable; and that accounts of the constituting subjects of shopping need to take seriously the spatialities of subjectivities.

DOE-Defense Program's CFC Retrofit Plan for HVAC/Chillers

ABSTRACT The Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Defense Programs (DP) is responsible for the research, development, and testing of defense related applications of nuclear energy and the operation and maintenance of facilities required to support these efforts along with any associated production activities. DP had been the landlord for hundreds of individual facilities located at principally eight sites around the United States, representing about 50 percent of DOE's capital assets. In 1994, DP established a CFC HVAC/Chiller Retrofit Program to facilitate the replacement and retrofit of chillers and to promote compliance with CFC environmental and energy conservation laws and regulations. Through comprehensive inventories, DP found that it owns approximately 200 old and inefficient CFC chillers, which if replaced, would greatly reduce electricity consumption and costs, and reduce exposure to potential non-compliance with refrigerant leak regulations. The major domestic chiller manufacturers indicate that they are producing at or near full capacity to meet the demands of both government and private sector customers. With estimates of approximately 63,000 chillers nationally operating with CFCs, DP is concerned that market pressure will raise prices and that shop space for future orders will become increasingly scarce. Saving energy and money while protecting the stratospheric ozone layer is the goal of the DP CFC HVAC/Chiller Retrofit Program. While working to minimize the release of ozone-depleting substances to the environment and moving to convert existing equipment to use alternative refrigerants, the installation of more efficient chillers also promotes environmental stewardship in that reduced energy consumption translates into reduced emissions of noxious gases from the generation of electricity.

Singapore and the Experience of Place in Old Age

Since the 1970s, humanistic geography has gained adherents among geographers who emphasize the centrality of and their condition (Tuan 1976, 266). Humanistic research has focused on human relationships with place, notably the development, characterization, and outcome of such relationships. Except in relation to homes (Perkins 1988), neighborhoods (Rivlin 1982), or places of worship (Kong 1992), few authors except Graham Rowles (1978, 1980, 1983a, 1983b) have investigated in detail how elderly people relate to the places with which they interact. We address this deficiency in the context of Singapore, in view of the growing proportion and number of the aged and the necessity for understanding their experiences and considering their future needs. Specifically, we use two case studies, Tiong Bahru and Chinatown, to explore how the elderly in rapidly modernizing Singapore relate to their places. Environments are especially important to aging residents, affecting their adaptation to change, the sustenance of their personal identities, and their continued participation in life, particularly given their diminishing physical ability, reduced economic means, and changing surroundings. Tiong Bahru and Chinatown represent two areas with larger-than-average concentrations of elderly residents. The census divisions Tiong Bahru and Kreta Ayer, which correspond closely to our study areas, are two of only seventeen census divisions (out of a total of eighty-one) in which the age category with the highest proportion of residents is sixty and above (Lau 1992, 22-24). Tiong Bahru can be divided into two areas [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The first comprises primarily three-to-five-story walk-up apartments, built between the 1930s and 1950s by the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), the housing authority prior to the current Housing and Development Board (HDB). The second comprises the high-rise HDB apartments in the Kim Tian estate. Physically, Tiong Bahru has not undergone many changes in the past few decades. The SIT apartments still look much the way they did when they were newly constructed. Likewise, Seng Poh Road Market / Food Center has been in existence since 1950, although the stalls were already operating in an unauthorized open-air market in the immediate prewar years (SIT n.d.). Only in the past five years have some changes been apparent: a Mass Rapid Transit station is now in operation on Tiong Bahru Road, and two developments on either side of the same road (one residential and one commercial retail, office, and entertainment) were recently completed. Even so, these changes have not drastically altered the essentially Old World environment of the SIT heartland. In demographic terms, however, the area has changed. The distinctively aged community has resulted because, over the years, many younger people have moved out to newer HDB housing developments that offer bigger and better facilities. Chinatown, in contrast, has seen many physical changes over the years. The shophouses (two- or three-story units in which the ground floor functions as shop space and the upper floors as residential quarters) were threatened by the bulldozer in the early 1980s; some were in fact demolished [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. However, with a change in thinking toward a proconservationist stance, the Urban Redevelopment Authority has begun government conservation works and has initiated such works in the private sector since the late 1980s. Many of the elderly residents who lived in squalid conditions in these shophouses have since been moved to HDB apartments elsewhere, primarily in the adjacent Sago Street-Kreta Ayer Road vicinity. Focusing on these as our study areas, we conducted in-depth interviews with residents in 1993 and 1994, tape recording them when we were permitted to and translating them from Mandarin and other Chinese dialects when we had to. Part of our analysis was based on the observations we made as we walked through Tiong Bahru and Chinatown, noting in particular where the elderly congregated and what they did in their meeting places. …

An analysis of shopping center investment

During the 1980s, the oversupply of retail space has lowered rents, raised vacancies, and damaged the integrity of financial institutions as developers and other borrowers have been forced into default. This paper explores the propensity of developers to create shopping center space. The research draws on the macroeconomic investment literature to formulate a model of shopping center investment. We estimate our model using shopping center and sales data from all fifty states of the United States and the District of Columbia. Our results provide evidence about how investment in new shopping space responds to changes in retail sales, capital costs, and taxes.

Space: Parkinson’s Law is Alive and Well and Living in a Warehouse!

Discusses the principle of Parkinson′s Law – “Stock expands to fill the storage space available” – as it applies to space utilization in industrial warehousing. Compares the poor use of industrial space with the excellent utilization of shop space by retailers, suggesting the retailer′s need to maximize display is the reason for this discrepancy. Summarizes that increased capacity is available without expansion by adopting the principles of the retailer.

Owner and Organizational Characteristics of Black‐and White‐Owned Businesses: Self Employed Blacks Had Less Training, Fewer Resources, Less Profits, but Had Similar Survival Rates

Abstract. Owner and organizational characteristics of 94 Black‐owned businesses and 385 White‐owned businesses in Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C, are examined. Black business owners had fewer years of education and less business experience than their White counterparts. Black businesses were also smaller, more labor intensive, located in poorer neighborhoods, less likely to have insurance, visited by fewer customers per day, more likely to rent their shop space, and to be less profitable than White businesses. However, despite these organizational and individual characteristics, the survival rates of Black and White businesses were not significantly different. Logit analyses suggested that variables such as race, education, size of business, and the average income of those living in the neighborhood, in this sample, did have significant effects on business profitability but did not explain business survival.

Status of the Kansas State University superconducting linac project

Funding for the construction of the superconducting linac at Kansas State University was approved by the Department of Energy on May 15, 1985. The project is funded out of the Division of Chemical Sciences, USDOE. Initial design and staff technical training was initiated during 1984–85 with laboratory personnel working at both Florida State University and Argonne National Laboratory. The linac under construction is based upon the Nb split-ring resonator technology developed at Argonne National Laboratory for ATLAS. The linac at Kansas State University will have 14 superconducting resonators with nine low-β (β=0.06) and five high-β (β=0.105) units operating at 97 MHz. Work has progressed on both of the single-resonator cryostats for time bunching and energy rebunching, respectively, with the major cryostat components presently under construction by C. E. Raymond Enterprise Manufacturing, a division of Combustion Engineering, with scheduled delivery of the single resonator cryostat vacuum housings, LN2-cooled heat shields, and LHe Dewars on January 17, 1986. Orders for all Nb-clad Cu resonators have been placed with Argonne National Laboratory and two low-β units are currently under construction. Requests for quotations for a 300-W LHe refrigerator (expandable to 500 W) 1000-l storage Dewar and LHe distribution system have been issued. The building addition which includes a new accelerator/experimental hall (∼6000 ft2 basement structure) and ground-level laboratory support space including additional experimental setup space, additional machine shop space, and mechanical equipment space, is currently under construction with a completion date scheduled for May 1986. Additional personnel training on LHe refrigeration systems is scheduled for January 1986, at the Texas Accelerator Center and at Florida State University.

SD法を用いた店舗空間の希望雰囲気の分析

SD法を用いた店舗空間の希望雰囲気の分析

Procedures for Assessing the Viability of Shopping Centres

In the planning of shopping centres, assessments need to be made of the operational and commercial viability of a centre, given an observed or assumed level of total sales turnover and the configuration and size of the corresponding space assigned to shops. The usual procedure is to employ a norm consisting of some standard average sales to shop space ratio. This procedure ignores the fact that the ratio varies with average shop size, due to economies of scale in the relationship between shop space and sales per shop. A given level of sales requires more shopping space when it is distributed over many small shops than when it is concentrated in a few large units. The difference is substantial, and should not be ignored. Furthermore, an average sales to shop space ratio is a poor indicator of expected profit income. This paper offers an alternative approach, which is based on: - a relationship between shop space and sales which takes into account the effect of scale; - a relationship between profit income and sales which yields a better basis than the relationship between profitability and sales-to-shop-space ratio which is assumed in established practice.

Retail floorspace: Assessing the need for shops

A great deal of effort is devoted in planning exercises to balance the amount of new shopping floor space which can be permitted in one centre rather than another. David Thorpe suggests that the margin of error involved, because of the difficulties associated with forecasting total potential, may well be considerably greater than the “fine balancing” that occurs. This paper was originally presented at a PTRC Seminar in July 1975 at the University of Warwick.

Change of Characters of the Central Shopping Street in Sendai

The writer investigated the central shopping street, Higashi-ichi-bancho in Sendai on the items shown in the Tables I-III in 1960 and 1970.The results gained are as follows:1. Two department stores in the shopping street have large floor space and it enlarged considerably. Its ratio to that of other shops is more than 70% always. The floor spaces of retail shops which mainly deal such expensive goods as clothing, personal ornaments, play-things, furnitures and books have enlarged, too.2. So far as the number of employees is concerned, it is increasing a little in big shops, but is decreasing or equal in small shops these ten years. 3. Separation of shop and residence is going on through the shopping street, which is remarkable at the crossroads with three main streets.4. The total sale of the two department stores have extremely increased. And that of retail shops dealing mainly expensive goods is increasing too, but it does not come up to that of the department stores.5. Generally, cultural and expensive good stores and coffee shops have a tendency to be centralized, but the function of retail service in the central shopping street is gradually expanding.

A Report on the Organization of the Paper Cup Company

_EPaper Cup Company, a small company engaged in the manu,facture and sale of paper drink-ing cups and soda cups, was organized in I937 and experienced a rather slow growth during the first four years. Increased industrial activity resulting from war conditions brought a large increase in the demand for the product, and the company expanded very rapidly after I94I. Prior to the wartime expansion, the president had been able to maintain direct control over all phases of the company's activities. With the rapid growth of the company, however, he found it increasingly difficult to cope with all problems of management and supervision. The president felt the need of a definite plan of organization for the company that wouldrelieve him of the details of management, take care of existing operations, and provide for future possible expansion. He felt that his previous management experlence was inadequate to enable him to prepare such a plan of organization himself, and besides he had little time to devote to such a project. In May, I943, he decided to engage the services of some management consultants for the purpose of drawing up a functional organization chart for the company. The consultants spent several weeks making a survey of the historical background, the present operations, and the possible future development of the company. They found that the company had been incorporated on April 22, I937, with two principal stockholders. One of these was the man who is still the president of the company; he had been a successful salesman for another paperproducts company for several years. The other man had been a production engineer for the same company; he remained with this new company less than two years, when he sold his interests to the president. After the company was organized, several months were spent in designing machine No. i to make flat-bottomed paper cups. This project was abandoned in July, I937, after an expenditure of about $I5,000, and all efforts were devoted to machine No. 2 to make coneshaped paper drinking cups. Actual production was begun in a small loft building during the latter part of that year. Work was then started on the development of machines Nos. 3 and 4 for cone-shaped cups; but they were not placed into production until the company moved into a leased building at a new location in May, 1938. This building, with io,ooo square feet of floor space, housed the complete operations of the company, including factory, offices, shop, and storage space, until May,