“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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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  [...]