Sales and Advertising Rivalry in Interwar US Department Stores

Department stores represented one of the most advertising-intensive sectors of American inter-war retailing. Yet it has been argued that a competitive spiral of high advertising spending, to match the challenge of other local department stores, contributed to a damaging inflation of costs that eroded long-term competitiveness. We test these claims, using both qualitative archival data and establishment-level national data sets. Returns to stores’ advertising are shown to have fallen over the period, while own advertising led to retaliatory advertising by rival department stores, which substantially lowered returns on advertising dollars in the 1930s (but not the 1920s).Department stores, Interwar U.S. economic history, Advertising, Marketing

Let\u27s Go Shopping at the Square Cleveland\u27s Leading Downtown Department Stores: A Business Legacy

This book is a tribute to the eight major downtown Cleveland department stores and their many loyal customers. For over 150 years, these large stores dominated the local retail scene. They represented exciting places that not only provided a full range of goods and services all under one roof, but also, offered a special shopping adventure every time their customers visited.https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clevmembks/1024/thumbnail.jp

In search of a good neighbourhood

10 p., [5] p

The Gaze Across the Aisle: Architecture, Merchandising, and Social Roles at Marshall Field and Company, 1892 to 1914

Marshall Field and Company was a cultural and commercial anchor in Chicago\u27s downtown area known as \u27The Loop.\u27 By 1914, it had expanded into the largest department store in the world at that time. This article illustrates Field\u27s as a cultural and retail institution of artistry and popular education through a trope I term “the drama of shopping.” Using merchandising strategies adapted from the aesthetic movement, Field\u27s produced the drama of shopping with social and cultural implications about class, gender, and race in three ways: First, the architecture of the store served as a carefully designed theatrical space for seeing and being seen in the drama of shopping. The departmentalization and arrangement of merchandise by degree of expense and luxury differentiated and sorted Field\u27s clientele according to their social status and what they could afford to buy. Elite shoppers who purchased luxuries did so under the gaze of other shoppers, who watched from across the aisle. Second, Field\u27s merchandising and marketing followed trends of the new profession of domestic science. It served as the script for the drama of shopping, through which customers negotiated the cultural hierarchy of artistry and new technology. Third, merchandising resembled the subculture of the aesthetic movement, but without its controversial gender roles, while it privileged predominant Anglo-American culture and rendered other social groups, including people of color, invisible. Today, the social and cultural traditions of American department-store retail that began in the gilded age remain present as new forms of retail marketing. In turn the gendered cultural fences that divide retail patrons remain in the present day, though with different names and locations

Downtown and regional shopping centre retailing in Winnipeg

Report : xi, 90 p.The primary objectives of this study on Winnipeg's retail sector are: 1) to identify and analyze any structural and spatial changes which have occurred in downtown and regional shopping centre retail activity. 2) to attempt to identify some of the impacts/effects on downtown retail trade that could be attributed to regional shopping centre development. 3) to assess the changing physical and economic characteristics of the retail trade in Winnipeg. 4) to identify and analyze the shifts occurring in the types of retail activity within the downtown on a micro-level. 5) to identify and compare public perceptions and attitudes towards shopping downtown and/or at regional shopping centres. 6) to offer recommendations concerning present and future downtown development

Retail refreshed

This thesis explores how a `change-over-fixture\u27, a store fixture that transforms its shape and purpose, will help retailers keep up with the various aspects of merchandising needs as well as create a competitive advantage over many years. With Big Box retailers on the rise and an abundance of other smaller businesses increasing; Independent clothing retailers need to invest in new ideas to endure. In the past and currently, remodeling remains a final option to reboot the store\u27s image and bring customers in. It is not always a success but nonetheless an overwhelmingly popular option. The set of conditions following remodeling are sometimes far too risky for independent retailers. The high costs and time schedule can be a huge financial burden for the smaller business owner. The goal of the thesis is to propose a design that alleviates some of the costs and reduces the time consumed by smaller businesses (also referred to as independent retailers throughout this paper) when dealing with competition as well as the unavoidable merchandise cycles

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Strategic Corporate Research Report

[Excerpt] Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (hereinafter Wal-Mart) is the second-largest company in the world. It has more annual revenue than the GDP of Switzerland. It sells more DVDs, magazines, books, CDs, dog food, diapers, bicycles, toys, toothpaste, jewelry, and groceries than any other retailer does worldwide. It is the largest retailer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the second-largest in the United Kingdom, and the third largest in Brazil, With its partners, it is the largest retailer in Central America. Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and it has 1.8 million employees around the globe. Wal-Mart is so huge that it effectively sets the terms for large swaths of the global economy, from retail wages to apparel prices to transoceanic shipping rates to the location of toy factories. Indeed, if there is one single aspect to understand about the company, it is the fact that Wal-Mart is transforming the relations of production in virtually every product category it sells, through its relationships with suppliers. But its influence goes far beyond the economy. It sets social policy by refusing to sell certain types of birth control. Its construction of supercenters molds the landscape, shapes traffic patterns, and alters the local commercial mix. The retail goliath shapes culture by selling the music of patriotic country singer Garth Brooks but not the critical (and hilarious) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. It influences politics by donating millions to conservative politicians and think tanks. Wal-Mart is, in short, one of the most powerful entities in the world. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart has developed a long list of critics, including unions, human rights organizations, religious groups, environmental activists, community organizations, small business groups, academics, children’s rights groups, and even institutional investors. These groups have exposed the company’s illegal union-busting tactics, its many violations of overtime laws, its abuse of child labor, its egregious healthcare policies, its super-exploitation of immigrant workers, its rampant gender discrimination, the horrific labor conditions at its suppliers’ factories, and its unlawful environmental degradation. They have also chronicled the deleterious effect Wal-Mart has on the public coffers and the quality of community life. New Wal-Mart stores and distribution centers often swallow up government subsidies and tax breaks, take public land, create more congestion, reduce overall wages, destroy retail variety, and increase public outlays for healthcare. To its critics, Wal-Mart represents the worst aspects of 21st-eentury capitalism. Wal-Mart usually counters any criticism with two words: low prices. It is a powerful mantra in a consumerist world. The company does make more products affordable to more people, and that is nothing to sneeze at when wages are stagnant, jobs insecure, pensions disappearing, and health coverage shrinking. With low prices, Wal-Mart helps working men and women get more from their meager paychecks, more necessities like bread, and more luxuries, like roses, too. It is a brilliant and incontrovertible argument, and Wal-Mart’s most ardent defenders take it even farther. They say its obsession with low prices makes the entire economy more efficient and more productive. Suppliers and competitors have to produce more and better products with the same resources, and that redounds to everyone. In the micro, it means falling prices and rising product quality. In the macro, it means economic growth, more jobs, and higher tax revenues. To its defenders, Wal-Mart represents the best aspects of 21st-century capitalism. Despite their radical opposition, critics and defenders of the world’s largest corporation agree on one thing: Wal-Mart represents 21st-century capitalism. It symbolizes a system of increasing market penetration and decreasing social regulation, where more and more aspects of life around the world are subject to economic competition. Wal-Mart’s success rests upon the ongoing destruction of social power in favor of corporate power. It takes advantage of the conditions of the neo-liberal world, from the availability of instant and inexpensive global communication to the continuing collapse of agricultural employment around the world to the rapid diffusion of technological innovation to the oversupply of subjugated migrant labor in nearly every country to the continued existence of undemocratic and corporate-dominated governments. For some, this is as it should be, all part of capitalism’s natural and ultimately benign development. For the rest of us, Wal-Mart is at the heart of what is wrong with the world

Mapping Fashion in the \u27City by the Sea\u27: Shopping Districts in Newport, Rhode Island

Newport, Rhode Island is internationally recognized for both its prime location on Narragansett Bay and its storied history. Nicknamed the ‘City by the Sea,’ it is famous for its world-class sailing, colonial New England architecture, Gilded Age mansions, trendy restaurants and bars, and nearby beaches. Cultural tourism is a multi-million dollar business for Rhode Island, especially for Newport, where shopping is fourth on the list of revenue generators. The relationship of an American resort city’s geographical setting, built environment, and cultural heritage to its fashion retail sector has not been explored. Acknowledging that fashion contributes to a city’s image, the authors review Newport’s history, provide a profile of Newport today, map Newport’s nine shopping districts, and analyze Newport’s fashion retail sector on the various streets, squares, wharves, and piers. Such an analysis may prove useful to retailers in other resort cities—both small independent boutique owners and national chain stores—as well as city planners and tourism boards