ESSAYS ON RETAIL ENTRY AND EXIT

The landscape of the retail industry has witnessed dramatic changes over the past decades. Both manufacturers and retailers are increasingly challenged to find innovative ways to reach and delight not only their existing customers, but also potential new customers. In this dissertation, I aim to pin down the entry effects of an innovative channel -- online marketplaces in Essay 1 and Essay 2, and the exit effects of a traditional channel – Walmart supercenter in Essay 3. In Essay 1 “The Value of Online Marketplaces to Brand Manufacturers in Emerging Markets”, I apply an event-study methodology to examine whether manufacturers’ decisions are justified by studying the net impact of adopting marketplaces on a firm’s stock market return. To further gain insight into to whom gains may arise, I use a contingency framework and relate manufacturers’ short-term abnormal returns to manufacturers’ market knowledge and marketing strengths. The findings provide comprehensive guidance for manufacturers, global or local, to assess whether and to what extent they can take advantage of online marketplaces to thrive in emerging economies. In Essay 2 “For Better or for Worse: The Halo Effects of Online Marketplaces on Entrenched Brick-and-Mortar Stores”, I evaluate the impact of online marketplaces on entrenched brick-and-mortar stores -- whether and to what extent retailers and all brands within the category stand to lose or win. To address this question, I use a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) model to quantify the impact of online marketplaces. The study not only contributes theoretically to the scant literature on the interaction between online marketplaces and offline channels but also offers manufacturers insightful instructions on multichannel decisions. In Essay 3 “When Stores Leave: The Impact of Walmart Supercenter Closure on Retail Price”, I seek to understand how retail prices change following the exit of a local retailer by using Walmart supercenter closures in local U.S. markets as a working example. By using a difference-in-difference estimator with correction for selection bias, I find that, on average, consumers have to pay a higher price (+1.6%) after a Walmart supercenter’ exit. The study provides valuable insights into the potential impact of retail exit on price and consumer welfare.Doctor of Philosoph

Format blurring: how the advent of the Walmart Supercenter has changed the U.S. grocery industry

This paper develops a game-theoretic model that analyzes how a grocery store responds to the entry of a Walmart Supercenter using its store-format choice. By adopting a set of realistic assumptions, such as the cost advantage of Walmart and differentiated services of grocery stores, we find that the distance to a Walmart Supercenter is a key moderating factor in the store-format choice of grocery stores. Grocery stores would prefer to sell non-food items, but when sufficiently close to Walmart Supercenters they would specialise in food items, as consumers find it less costly to engage in two-stop shopping, making the gain from non-food items smaller. So an asymmetric equilibrium becomes feasible, wherein grocery stores carrying increasingly more non-food products and a new grocery store concept like Whole Foods and Wild Oats emphasising high-quality, organic foods can coexist. Our results yield important managerial implications. Under the specialisation strategy, the quality of its differentiated services should be sufficiently high, at least two to four times the disutility of two-stop shopping. Under the expansion strategy, grocery stores should engage in loss leadership, pricing non-food items below cost to lure large-basket consumers while earning higher margins from food items to compensate for the loss

Sustainability Assessment and Design Recommendations for the Meijer Store of Tomorrow

This project focused on identifying carbon emission abatement strategies for Meijer, specifically addressing lighting, space cooling and heating, and refrigeration, which constitute Meijer’s largest demand sectors. Additionally, the project evaluated strategies to reduce water consumption, waste generation and promote customer education of sustainable practices. The project was organized into three phases. In phase I, a comprehensive assessment of sustainable design and technology elements was conducted, which included a review of sustainability initiatives by other retail competitors. During Phase II, solutions were synthesized and reviewed in consultation with Meijer sustainability and design experts. Technological solutions were categorized into five store systems: energy, water and plumbing, sustainable sites, materials and resources, and customer experience elements. A rubric was then created to systematically evaluate strategies for the Market Format and Supercenter Meijer retail stores. Phase III included a detailed environmental and design analysis using the scoring rubric and supporting literature to identify the set of strategies that best reflect Meijer’s priorities. This report details the findings of this research and the portfolio of strategies that would help Meijer create the net zero energy, zero waste, and water efficient Store of Tomorrow prototype.Master of ScienceSchool for Environment and SustainabilityUniversity of Michiganhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154778/1/361_Sustainability Assessment and Design Recommendations for the Meijer Store of Tomorrow_Project35.pd

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

FOOD SHOPPING HABITS AND THE ASSOCIATION WITH DIET

Research suggests that the connection between poor diet and obesity among rural residents may be partially explained by limited access to healthy foods including fruits and vegetables (F&V). Based on federal suggestions to improve access, the purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between food shopping habits food venues and dietary intake of residents in rural counties of Kentucky. In May, 2013, a telephone survey was conducted using random-digit dial methods among n=149 participants in all three counties. Results showed that grocery shopping at supermarkets had a moderate positive correlation with F&V intake (r=.357, .348). These findings suggest participants who shop at supermarkets also consume F&V. Our study’s findings did not give a strong correlation between F&V consumption and farmers’ market use, which could be due to the locations of these markets, price of produce, or other environmental barriers that were not looked at in this study. Although the results from our study do not show a correlation, the majority of previous research supports the need to improve farmers’ market locations to help increase accessibility for groups with low F&V consumption and emphasize the importance of addressing economic barriers to food access

2013 Global Responsibility Report

The scope and boundaries of this report encompass the corporate, social, environmental and company responsibility efforts, while also providing snapshots into each of the individual markets around the globe. The report reviews the organization's progress and performance during fiscal year 2013, reflects areas where positive results have been achieved and specifies areas of opportunity we must continue to focus on. The reporting timeline covers the period of Feb. 1, 2012 -- Jan. 31, 2013 and builds on the last report, issued April 2012. Unless otherwise noted, all currency is in U.S. dollars

Walmart 2014 Global Responsibility Report

The scope and boundaries of the 2014 Walmart Global Responsibility Report encompass our corporate efforts related to workplace, compliance and sourcing, social and environmental responsibility, while also providing snapshots into each of our individual markets around the globe. The report reviews our progress and performance during FY2014, reflects areas where we've achieved tremendous positive results and specifies areas of opportunity we continue to focus on. The social and environmental indicators were obtained by internal survey and checks without the participation of external auditing. The reporting timeline covers the period of Feb. 1, 2013 -- Jan. 31, 2014, and builds on our last report, issued April 2013. Unless otherwise noted, all currency is in U.S. dollars

Online-Offline cooperation and complementation analysis

Due to the fast and efficient implementation of new purchase and sales processes, different current options through how both sides, consumers and retailers carry out purchases, are gaining importance over the last years, what generates the research of growth and improvement processes. Nowadays online sales are moving forward by leaps and bounds though the need of keeping offline traditional system has been verified, so the strategy seeks combining both of them and with it obtaining the maximum benefit for consumers and also to ensure retailers’, as well as providing an experience to customers during the buying process through the omnichannel strategy. But this paper’s objective is to answer the different questions related to the online and offline connection, their origins and development, such as: 1. Which is the relationship between online and offline channels. 2. If they are complementary strategies rather than substitutes. 3. And in case of being complementary strategies, how do they work together and what profits do they award. With this it is sought not only to understand the new tendencies and their development through the last years and to know how to obtain the higher profit with each of them but also to find out how the business development will be for the coming years depending not only on consumers’ behavior facing all these new strategies but also on each industry and its possibilities. To better understand the behaviour of these channels and its operation three companies from three different sectors whose business approaches were quite different in their beginnings, as well as their strategies, focusing on a single platform, have been chosen to analyse how they have been evolving since their starts until today, where both online and offline channels and the different platforms that compose them through which the client can interact with the brand become links in a single chain achieving the fusion not only between the different channels but also between the customer and the company

Essays on Dispersion, Fairness Perception and Partitioning of Online Prices

My dissertation is primarily on online pricing, by empirically investigating how formats and structures of prices influence consumer responses and subsequent purchasing behavior, brand choice, etc. Currently, three essays of my dissertation explore topics on price fairness perception, price dispersion, as well as price partitioning. First, although previous researchers have tested effects of price changes on consumer\u27s perceptions on price (e.g., Maxwell 1999, Campbell 2007), little work has focused on the effects of prices/costs levels on online price judgments and virtually none has examined it jointly with both internal/external reference prices from multiple comparison parties. Less work has applied price decreasing and increasing together to observe (un)fairness or associated them with asymmetric liking and disliking judgments (Herr and Page 2004). To fill this gap, we employ an expected utility model incorporating emotional factors such as disappointment (elation) and regret (rejoicing) to model online price fairness perceptions. We demonstrate a two-stage evaluation and find interesting asymmetric patterns of significant effects of four emotions on price fairness. Second, there does not exist yet a quantitative review synthesizing and explaining the discrepancy of findings on price dispersion. An empirical generalization is conducted to statistically and quantitatively summarize in which way online price dispersion goes, and what are the true determinants of the magnitude of price dispersion in E-commerce. By a meta-analysis study, we find that product category, measurement of price dispersion, controlling for heterogeneity in the study and so on, are significant factors. Third, shipping and handling (S&H) fee is examined as a popular form of partitioned price offered by E-tailers. We employ a Gain-and-Loss Utility model incorporating different levels of price gains and losses presented to customers in the transactions to model online purchase behaviors in a strategic pricing framework. We find significant asymmetry in the effects of price surcharges and price discounts on purchase quantity as well as on how customers organize and manage their shopping baskets

Austerity in America

The main focus of Austerity in America concerns how the country\u27s geographical belts contribute to the culture of austerity in US capitalism in the time since Reaganism. In this dissertation I examine the Corn Belt, the Rust Belt, the Bible Belt, the Sun Belt and the Marijuana Belt as stages in the development of America’s culture of austerity. Since the early 1980s America’s culture of austerity has protected the wealthy elite from the working classes, who have been punished by the offshoring of US manufacturing jobs in post-Fordist corporate restructuring. The overall goal of this research is to address how the culture of austerity, the demand that Americans do more for less, protects the concentration of wealth in US capitalism from the popular demand for better paying jobs and social security. The global hegemony of US corporations produces economic opulence for the top one percent and economic deprivation for the masses, who enjoy little to no social security. The solid economic security of industrial jobs and company pensions for the working classes has been melted into thin air by capitalist exchange. In the culture of austerity, the political regime of tax cuts for the wealthy ensures an austere diet of low wages, no company pensions and pathetic social security for the working masses, who work longer and longer hours for less and less. US capitalism produces unparalleled economic wealth, yet Americans have little economic security