“A glamour hangs over the glittering booth, and a tantalizing air of clever new things”. Selfridges? Abercrombie & Fitch? No – Henry James describing a WHSmith railway bookstall in 1888. Today a good bookshop still provides a focal point for its community, a peaceful haven to while away spare hours, and a stimulating environment in which to buy gifts (surely nothing is more tightly targeted to its recipient than a well chosen book) or a modest self-indulgence.

But this centuries old form of retailing is under considerable threat. In most countries the market is shrinking. In the UK its value in real terms has fallen 6% since 2004, although, thanks to fierce discounting, the volume sold has increased 10%. In all territories traditional bookshops, both chains and independents, are finding themselves being squeezed between internet retailers and cherry-picking discounters, such as supermarkets. And if that isn’t enough there is the emerging threat of e-books and the piracy that will inevitably accompany the growth of that market.

Read the rest of this entry: Hard times for bookshops »

In 2009 we posted the first part of an assessment of grocery home delivery. Given the barnstorming results of the online grocery services of the major UK supermarket retailers over Christmas, we thought we should post the second part of the assessment: a blow-by-blow account of the service provided by each. For the record, Tesco alone reported that it delivered over 100 million items to almost 1.5 million customers in the run up to Christmas. Tesco Direct had sales growth of over 50% with a strong performance in toys, TVs, games and entertainment… But what lies behind the press releases?

I begin with Tesco. They deliver to my area – and to most households in the UK from remote areas of Scotland to the Scilly Isles off the coast of Cornwall. I have a Tesco Clubcard that I haven’t used regularly since four house moves failed every time to make Tesco my nearest or most convenient store. This seems remarkable given that Tesco has over 2,000 stores – more than Sainsbury, Asda/Wal-Mart and Morrisons stores added together.

Read the rest of this entry: Home delivery in the 21st century, Part 2 »

So-called Location-Based Services applications have been around for some time and have often been described as ‘solutions in search of problems’. But early implementations were clunky and unreliable, GPS expensive and not widely available and consumer unused to or unwilling to pay significantly for such information. Contemporary applications show much greater promise. Two developments now mean that LBS opportunities for retailers are now ripe for development. These are the growth of GPS capability in handsets and the exponential growth of free of cheap downloadable third party applications and mobile web interfaces being designed increasingly as part of an integrated go-to-market package, rather than as an afterthought or experiment by firms. Analysts Gartner estimate that some 29% of new phone handsets will include GPS in 2009. And at the time of writing, some 100,000 applications have been developed in the iPhone App Store with over 2bn total downloads.

Read the rest of this entry: Location, location, location… redux »

A recent discussion in Retail Week about the interaction between business schools and the retail shop floor: contains interviews with Paul Freathy from Stirling, John Pal from MMU and from me about the issues raised. Read it here.

As a social science researcher myself, I always feel duty bound to undertake email surveys. This can be a tiresome duty. This is partly because, as a result, I am exposed to the all the vicissitudes of bad practice in design and administration, ludicrous questioning and all the obsessions of anxious clients that the industry has to offer. One national broadsheet is once again obsessed with what I think about their re-launch; another survey is unreasonably curious about the football teams I support (even though I don’t support any); a further study wants to use me simply as a way of getting at the views of my 13-year old son. Panel surveys generally ‘forget’ who I am and require constant reminders of my age, gender and geographical location by TV region. But it was with a particularly heavy heart that I recently opened the third panel survey request of the day from a well-known UK research house to read that ‘This survey should take no more than 45 minutes to complete!’ Instinctively, my finger reached for the delete button.
Read the rest of this entry: This survey should take no more than 45 minutes to complete … »

Always on the lookout for new retail formats, I was struck by these two candidates, found in Barcelona over the summer. “Tell it like it is” is clearly reaching new standards of honesty.

Very Cheap, Barcelona

Received wisdom would have us believe that if there is a type of retailing that is surviving if not thriving in the economic downturn, it is Internet-based retailing. In the UK, headlines have consistently suggested that savvy consumers have abandoned the High Street and taken to the Internet in their droves to take advantage of cheaper prices and cut-throat competition. However, whilst UK online sales appear to have been consistently stronger over the past few months than store-based sales, they have been growing at only of third of their rate in December 2008. And in the US, the position is even worse: online retail sales actually fell year-on-year by 4.9% in the final quarter of 2008 after a decade of continuous growth (albeit at half the rate of conventional store sales, which fell by a staggering 8.6% over the same period). (See chart.) So those headlines aren’t really giving us the full picture – which is, as ever, considerably more complex. Longer term it may even mean us having to throw out some of our conventional notions of what retailing actually is because of the ways in which some consumers are starting to behave both within and across marketing channels. To understand what is going on, we need to look first at the context affecting non-store sales growth and how our attitudes have already had to change.
Read the rest of this entry: Can online buck the trend? »

From just after the Second World War until early in the 1980s, my Uncle Sam had a small grocery store in north east London. When he first opened the shop, after his ‘apprenticeship’ with Jack Cohen and his time as a desert rat, the area was largely Jewish and so he stocked jars of gefilte fish and packets of matzos alongside the 57 varieties of Heinz and the staples such as the rice, flour, tea and sugar that he weighed into paper bags.

He knew most of his customers by name and reputation.

In the 1960s, the demography changed to include a greater West Indian population and so he included salt cod and Jamaican dry crackers. In an area of London that included pockets of real deprivation and before the invention of credit cards, he gave credit to regular customers.

Paramount Fruiterers, Stoke Newington

He knew most of his customers by name and reputation, and although by nature he was rather taciturn, he became a well-loved character along with Queenie from the flower stall and Sonny the barber.
Read the rest of this entry: Home Delivery in the 21st Century. Part 1 »

Retail is problematic as a field of study. Characterised as simply ‘selling stuff’, retail lacks the glamour of the high tech industries or the worthiness of public service. Retail is never considered blue-chip and is not usually a popular career choice among recent graduates. With very few retailers appearing in the ranks of popular employers  (US retailers Whole Foods Market and Wegmans being the exception in the Fortune top 30 ‘best companies to work for’), even international retailers with excellent opportunities can struggle to attract the top talent.

Read the rest of this entry: Retail education, research & practice »