Traditional Retail Formats Research Articles

Hypermarkets in Oman: a study of consumers’ shopping preferences

Purpose – Hypermarkets have emerged as an important retail format in many parts of the world. The purpose of this paper is to explore consumer behaviour towards store preferences, particularly hypermarkets, in Oman. Design/methodology/approach – Following a mixed method approach, primary data, collected mainly using questionnaires and focus groups, were analysed to reveal consumer preferences. After pilot testing, 300 structured questionnaires were administered, of which 164 completed questionnaires were accepted for analysis. Data on store choice attributes were collected and analysed to reveal respondents’ preferences. Respondents’ characteristics were also measured using socio-demographic variables and were compared with their purchasing behaviour. Findings – By offsetting traditional markets, hypermarkets have emerged as one of the important retail formats in the urban areas of Oman. Their emergence has impacted trade in the traditional markets, the souqs. A weekly trip to the hypermarket is becoming an established feature of Omani life. Employed, educated or prosperous Omani consumers and expatriates prefer hypermarkets and these preferences surge during hot weather conditions. Consumers visit hypermarkets not only for purchases but also for recreation. Several factors affect consumer choice of hypermarkets in Oman, and these are listed in the outcomes of the study. Research limitations/implications – This study mainly focusses on consumers from selected hypermarkets in the Muscat and the Batinah regions of Oman. Although these regions are home to more than half of the Omani population, similar studies on other prominent regions will help in generalizing the preferences of consumers. Practical implications – Beyond an academic investigation to better understand the issue, the findings are important to help policy makers, town planners, and retailers better understand, plan, and evolve a consumer friendly retail sector. The findings will also help in understanding the regional imbalances in retailing activities, locally and globally. Social implications – The findings will help in the planning of certain retail policies to assure the notion of accessibility, affordability, and availability of global products and services to Omani consumers and also in striking a balance between traditional and modern retail formats to maintain diversity, growth, and overall consumer satisfaction. Originality/value – This paper furthers understanding of retailing issues in a conservative Islamic society in general; and in an area, Oman, that has not been covered before, in particular.

Influence of hedonic and utilitarian motivations on retailer loyalty and purchase intention: a facebook perspective

Social networks are an innovative tool that people use to communicate with family, friends and, increasingly, businesses. To optimize social networks as a marketing strategy, apparel retailers must understand consumers׳ motivations to interact with retailers via social media. We argue consumers׳ motivations for shopping on Retail Facebook Pages (RFP) compared to traditional retail formats may differ. The purpose of the study was to examine the influence of utilitarian and hedonic motivations (i.e., time savings, information access, bargain perception, and experiential shopping) on purchase intention and loyalty among consumers that use RFP. Using SEM, we show that experiential shopping influences loyalty, but not purchase intention, that bargain perception influences neither purchase intention nor loyalty, that information access influences time savings and loyalty, and that loyalty impacts purchase intention.

The point of purchase is wherever the consumer is, so what is the future for shopper marketing?

How can retailers and brands offer the best possible customer experience in a shopping landscape increasingly fragmented by technology? Shopper marketing introduced the idea of influencing people by targeting communications to them as and when they shopped. But when traditional retail formats are no longer relevant to many consumers’ lives, how does one create a meaningful retail experience? This paper examines the challenges posed by the emergence of the ‘agile consumer’, and the impact on branding and selling when the point of purchase moves to wherever the shopper is. This pragmatic and informative paper describes the three main challenges in retail — datafication, relevance and experience — and the birth of a new discipline, namely retail experience. This paper provides practical ways for retailers in any sector to meet these challenges as opportunities, offering best-in-class examples of retailers engaging consumers who expect their shopping experience to be everywhere, instant and personal. It shares new research into how digital and mobile channels are transforming the way people shop. As well as detailing the new intertwined path to purchase, the paper offers practical ways for brands to communicate with their intended audience across disparate channels to create a supreme retail experience.

The French Grocery Retail Company Intermarché Develops the ‘Click and Drive’ Model

The purpose of this case study is to let the readers identify the key success factors of the French grocery retail companies’ drive-through model. A case study approach is used to describe clearly issues confronting Intermarché, the third largest French grocery retail company, to the important and fast drive-in model development. The large French grocery retailers are investing heavily in the ‘click and drive’ format in order to avoid having to make home deliveries and bear the substantial costs associated with the ‘last mile’. Investing in selected drive-in locations is a cheaper way for them to expand their area of coverage than investing in new outlets. But they still have to deal with a new and difficult format, which presents a number of challenges from the strategic, logistic and marketing points of view. This case study provides an insight into the success of the grocery ‘click and drive’ (or drive—or drive-in) model developed by French grocery retail companies and allows understanding the basis of their competitive advantages. It can also help large grocery retailers to achieve their development objectives and counter the stagnation of traditional retail formats in Western Europe.

China Through Indian Eyes

China Through Indian Eyes

An empirical comparison of market efficiency: Electronic marketplaces vs. traditional retail formats

Researchers have found that price dispersion and market inefficiency exists in electronic marketplaces. Little attention has been bestowed to explore difference in market efficiency between traditional and electronic marketplaces. This study integrates both product and channel preference factors to analyze differences in market efficiency between electronic and traditional shopping environments. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is applied to calculate market efficiency for single-channel and multi-channel shoppers. Results show that market efficiencies vary across consumer segments and products. In summary, this paper enhances understanding of market efficiency by incorporating behavioral segment and product characteristics into the explanatory framework.

Quantifying barriers impeding the diffusion of supermarkets in China: The role of shopping habits

The present study contributes to the literature on supermarket diffusion by incorporating shopping habit factors, beyond socioeconomic factors and store characteristic factors, into a framework for predicting consumers' choice to shop in traditional versus modern retail formats. Further, this study aims to estimate the relative importance of these variables compared to other factors. Our results show that socioeconomic factors have minimal impact on consumer choice. Shopping habit factors have as great or even larger impact as market-relevant and product-relevant attributes, especially for fresh-food and cooked-food shopping.

E‐commerce: exploring the critical success factors

PurposeThe objective of this piece of qualitative research is to identify the key success factors (KSFs) of the grocery “click and drive” (or drive or drive‐in) model developed by French grocery retail companies and to understand the basis of their competitive advantages.Design/methodology/approachThe authors compare the conclusions of a review of the literature with an analysis of the various grocery drive‐in approaches developed in France. These approaches are studied by applying a multi‐method qualitative perspective comprising semi‐structured interviews with managers and e‐consumer focus groups.FindingsThe research confirms – with the exception of the quality of customer reception, which is particularly valued by managers and consumers – the main key success factors identified in the literature, and reveals a real consensus among the main operators on those KSFs and on the nature of the kind of core competences required in order to obtain competitive advantages.Research limitations/implicationsThe comparison of the real profitability of “drive‐in” sales outlets and a more precise evaluation of the advantages of an integrated multi‐channel approach would provide more accurate results. Moreover, the authors have limited this study to an analysis of the French experience. The research implies that French grocery retailers should develop, along with a more differentiated logistical system, an improved approach to customer relations marketing. Moreover, it implies that “click and drive” outlets enable traditional grocery retailers to sharpen their competitive edge.Originality/valueThis article provides an original analytical approach to the identification of the critical success factors of large grocery retailers developing drive‐in services. In answering this research question, the study should also help large grocery retailers to achieve their development objectives and counter the stagnation of traditional retail formats, especially the hypermarket.

Trendy shopping replacing traditional format preferences

The Indian retail sector is going through a transformation and the emerging market is witnessing a significant change in its growth pattern. Both existing and new players are experimenting with new retail formats. Consumers’ are also in favor of these retail formats for trendy shopping. The present paper is first of its kind to take the various important aspects together, namely, emerging retail formats, demographic factors and attributes affecting customers’ buying preferences from these retail formats for designing a framework. A self-structured questionnaire has been used for collecting the primary data from 500 urban consumers from major cities of Punjab in India. The study has used the descriptive statistics, ANOVA test and factor analysis for analyzing the data. The findings of the paper reveal that consumers’ prefer emerging retail formats due to its significant product attributes like improved quality, variety of brands and assortment of merchandise and store attributes like parking facility, trained sales personnel and complete security. The retail formats have been classified into two categories; malls, specialty stores and hyper/supermarkets are recognized as modern retail formats and discount stores, convenience stores and department stores are recognized as traditional retail formats. Key words: Retail formats, consumers, demography, product attributes, store attributes.

Quality Measurement and Consumer Satisfaction with Modern Retailing Ananalytical Study

In India, the retail sector is the second largest employer after agriculture. Globally India has the highest absolute number and the highest per capita number of retail formats, India is the fifth largest retail destination in the retail outlets. The Indian retail industry has been growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28 per cent for the last five years and provides employment to 8 per cent of India's working population. Organized retail formats including departmental stores, hypermarkets, supermarkets and specialty stores are fast replacing traditional retail formats such as stores (small ‘mom-and-pop’ general stores). The boom in this sector started after the liberalization in 1991 in the country (Singh 2003). Several large chains have entered the bandwagon and have achieved fair to significant success. The changes in the nation's social structure such as; improvement of the economy, consumerism, urbanization, the increasing number of nuclear families, double income households, improvement in literacy rates and working women profusion of brands have been the main causal factor for the development of these modern formats.

Persistence of Traditional Retailing in an Island Town

Problem statement: The convergence of modern retail formats in the developing world is resisted by the persistence of traditional retail formats. The issue of lower-circuit and middle-circuit in traditional retail trade in the modernizing urban arena has raise debates about its co-existence in different cultural and geographical settings. The aim of this study is to examine the persisting organizational features of sundry and general store retail trade in Labuan town, East Malaysia. Approach: A descriptive design using qualitative approach is utilized. Data is collected from a series of recursive informal interview from a total of 14 sundry and general retailers. Data is analyzed from themes derived from narrative account. Results: The findings reveal that the persistence of traditional retailing can be characterized by family business and the stability of sole proprietorship, coupled with the prevalence of independent outlets. The reasons attributed to the persistence of traditional retailing are a combination of organizational capacity factors of the retail traders and the situational context of the island economy. Conclusion: Island towns have a unique capacity to preserve certain retail trades that are under threat in conventional geographical context. This implies that the island with porous borders, not only have a confluence of external influence, but can sustain economic cultures. Future research can explore the persistence of cultural goods in these sundry and general stores to see the extent to which diverse socio-economic market structures are served.

Modern Food Retailers and Traditional Markets in Developing Countries: Comparing Quality, Prices, and Competition Strategies in Thailand

AbstractSupermarkets and hypermarkets are expanding rapidly in many developing countries. While consequences for farmers and consumers were analyzed recently, little is known about the implications for traditional retail formats such as wet markets. Using data from a market survey in Thailand and hedonic regressions, we analyze quality and prices for fresh vegetables from different retail outlets. Compared to wet markets, modern retailers sell higher quality at higher prices, indicating that they are primarily targeting better‐off consumers, and not directly competing for the same market segments. Yet there are signs that modern and traditional markets will gradually converge. Policy implications are discussed.

Antecedents of supermarket formats’ adoption and usage: A study in the context of non-western customers

This research deals with the process of food retailing modernization—the process through which supermarket formats (supermarkets and hypermarkets) diffuse, replace traditional retail formats and gain market share. The study first divides the process into three components (diffusion, adoption, and usage of supermarket formats), then, through two independent studies, we apply an empirical framework that identifies factors motivating format adoption and usage in the context of non-Western countries. The empirical results, utilizing two surveys involving 961 respondents, indicate strong evidence for most of the hypotheses drawn from the theoretical framework. Specifically, among other findings, the analyses reveal that consumer economic abilities and format outputs comprise key factors affecting format adoption. However, the impacts of these factors vary among the populations in the study. The findings also point to the significant effects of three variable sets on the extent of supermarket use among the adopting consumers regardless of their economic status. These variables include format outputs, religious variables and ethnic-cultural attributes related to food consumption patterns of Muslim-Arab consumers. The article closes with managerial implications and future research.

Grocery shopping and the Internet: exploring French consumers' perceptions of the ‘hypermarket’ and ‘cybermarket’ formats

The growth of e-commerce calls into question the viability of traditional retail formats. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), especially the Internet, now play a major role in retailing. With the stagnation of the hypermarket format in France, developing ICT could be a way for grocery retail companies to reinitiate growth. Some questions arise concerning the consumers' acceptance of these new technologies for food retailing. How does the consumer perceive the opportunities for the Internet and what associations do they hold for their favourite store? To what extent could consumers integrate ICT, especially the Internet, in their current or in future grocery shopping behaviours? Within this context, this paper focuses on the ‘consumer–store’ relationships. The research aims to explore consumers' perceptions of hypermarket and cybermarket formats for grocery shopping. The methodology is qualitative and based on 18 semi-structured interviews and on three focus groups of French consumers. Results show that the hypermarket format continues to appeal to French consumers while the cybermarket format remains unclear. The two targets – ‘the organised’ and ‘the grumblers’ – are an exception to this trend.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

Mergent's Dividend AchieversVolume 3, Issue 3 p. 299-299 U.S. Company Reports Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.† First published: 30 June 2006 https://doi.org/10.1002/div.4525Citations: 3 † Contact: : S. Robson Walton — Chmn. Address: : 702 S.W. Eighth Street, Bentonville, AR 72716 Web Site: : www.wal-mart.com AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Retail - General (MIC: 5.2 SIC: 5331 NAIC: 452990) Wal-Mart Stores operates retail stores in various formats around the world. Co.'s Wal-Mart Stores segment consists of three different traditional retail formats, Supercenters, Discount Stores, and Neighborhood Markets, all of which operate in the U.S, and its online retail format, Walmart.com. At Jan 31 2006, Co. operated 1,209 Discount Stores, 1,980 Supercenters, 567 SAM'S CLUBs and 100 Neighborhood Markets in the U.S. Internationally, at Jan 31 2006, Co. operated units in Argentina (11), Brazil (295), Canada (278), Germany (88), Japan (398), Mexico (774), Puerto Rico (54), South Korea (16) and the U.K. (315). Co. also operated 56 stores through joint ventures in China at Jan 312006. Citing Literature Volume3, Issue3Summer 2006Pages 299-299 RelatedInformation

Using key informant insights as a foundation for e-retailing theory development

Retailers are experiencing varying degrees of success as they strive to incorporate Internet technology into traditional retail formats. Although a variety of explanations for uncertainty surrounding electronic retailing (e-retailing) have been offered, the lack of a sound theoretical framework driving e-retailing decisions is at the heart of challenges facing Internet retailers. We argue that the Internet represents a sufficiently unique retail environment that practitioners and academicians alike should approach the development of knowledge and understanding in this arena in a mode of “discovery.” As such, qualitative and exploratory research methods can contribute significantly to e-retailing theory and decision-making frameworks. We present results of a key informant study of e-retailers, and provide the theoretical foundation for a model for effective integration of the Internet into the retail mix.

Viewpoint: reaching the consumer through e‐grocery VMI

Current e‐grocery models are based on the consumer making his or her purchase over the Internet, and the e‐grocer delivering the purchase to the household. However, there are numerous opportunities for innovative new services. Analyzes the opportunities offered by bar code and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to develop a new type of e‐grocery related service, namely vendor‐managed inventory (VMI) in the household. In assessing the opportunity for extending the value offering of an e‐grocery business to VMI in the household a number of key operational issues are addressed, i.e. data capture, solution robustness and cost saving potential in the supply chain. The analysis indicates that the development of new value offerings such as VMI is critical if e‐grocery businesses are ever to gain a competitive advantage over traditional retail formats.

Interactive Home Shopping: Consumer, Retailer, and Manufacturer Incentives to Participate in Electronic Marketplaces

The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.