Making a living in the Caribbean requires resourcefulness and even a willingness to circumvent the law. Women of color in Jamaica encounter bureaucratic mazes, neighborhood territoriality, and ingrained racial and cultural prejudices. For them, it requires nothing less than a herculean effort to realize their entrepreneurial dreams.

In "Higglers in Kingston," Winnifred Brown-Glaude puts the reader on the ground in frenetic urban Kingston, the capital and largest city in Jamaica. She explores the lives of informal market laborers, called "higglers," across the city as they navigate a corrupt and inaccessible "official" Jamaican economy. But rather than focus merely on the present-day situation, she contextualizes how Jamaica arrived at this point, delving deep into the island's history as a former colony, a home to slaves and masters alike, and an eventual nation of competing and conflicted racial sectors.

"Higglers in Kingston" weaves together contemporary ethnography, economic history, and sociology of race to address a broad audience of readers on a crucial economic and cultural center.

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically changed retailing, creating an uncertain scenario that has forced marketers, retailers, and policy makers to face new challenges to survive and thrive. These challenges affect all aspects of retailing, from supply chain management to consumers' shopping experience, and from buying decisions to improving health and safety management for all stakeholders. A lot has been to do about the negative consequences of the pandemic on sales, mainly for traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers and small-scale independent shops. However, quite some retailers have demonstrated a remarkable agility in developing and applying new tools, frameworks, and approaches to secure their longevity, while also safeguarding employees' and consumers' safety. Retail In A New World: Recovering From The Pandemic That Changed The World provides an overview and assessment of the issues and opportunities for retailers that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. The book encourages readers to adopt future-facing, fresh approaches to retail management. The basis for guiding readers in this endeavour consists of a thorough synthesises of emerging studies on the dramatic consequences of Covid-19 pandemic, in an accessible way. Seeking to understand how retailers can adapt their strategies, this book presents empirical and theoretical contributions with case studies that illustrate innovative and provocative solutions. Retail In A New World proposes tools and frameworks that serve as basis to survive the pandemic and thrive in a post-pandemic scenario. New practices are introduced to ensure a safer shopping experience, including reducing consumers' anxiety about in-person purchases, more efficient management of crowds in the stores, and adopting new technologies and service scripts to support the change.

The Association of Retail Technology Standards is an organization of retailers and vendors who have come together to create an extensive set of standards to reduce the cost and time for upgrading existing applications or adding new capabilities. To understand the depth of support that ARTS offers, consider that the granddaddy of ARTS standards, the ARTS Data Model, has more than seven hundred tables and seven thousand attributes.

In this new guide, author Richard Halter reveals how ARTS standards can help your business turn more consumers into customers and maximize profits. You can learn how to

- communicate better with potential customers;- harness the power of social retailing;- boost the success of promotions and discounts; and- organize your store to maximize sales.

Written in a language that everyone can understand, this guidebook explains how ARTS works together to help retailers and vendors. Take your business to a higher performing level and put more money in your pocket with ARTS for Retail.

Shopping is one of the most challenging and rewarding human activities. Pooler offers a captivating exploration of the emotional and psychological dimensions of shopping. What drives shoppers in various situations? Why do we shop the way we do? Why do people go to malls, boutiques, and Web sites with their credit cards in hand, despite not knowing what it is they're looking for? This book answers such questions, taking an incisive look at how shopping and shoppers have changed in recent years. For those in retailing and marketing, this guide to the fickle consumer's mindset offers concrete and practical advice on modern shopping behavior, along with important insights into the shopping psyche. Comprehending why people shop as they do is a daunting challenge for today's retailer. For example, why do people shop for bargain groceries yet purchase the latest luxury-model SUV? Why do people feel justified in splurging for Christmas, birthdays, or anniversaries, but suffer guilt from over-spending at other times of the year? Is clothes-shopping all about price and practicality, or is it more about emotional reward and psychological needs? Is the excitement in the quest or the acquisition? Why is there such a thing as a morning-after "urge to return" among certain shoppers, while others refuse to return an item even if it's flawed or doesn't fit? Pooler probes to the heart of today's complex shopper, providing valuable insights for retailers, advertisers, marketers, and consumers.

This is the first major biography of Alexander T. Stewart, known during his lifetime as The Merchant Prince for his success in retail, wholesale, and manufacturing in New York City. At the time of his death in 1876, Stewart was one of the three wealthiest men in America, along with William B. Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt. But, because he died with no surviving children, his name has all but been forgotten. In this work, Stewart is revived, his remarkable success as the father of the department store examined, and his great contributions to retailing acknowledged and recounted. Not only a definitive account, this story of a major figure in America's Gilded Age, as told by Stephen Elias, is also an absorbing tale.

This work fills a gap in the literature on American history and the history of our retail trade. It will be of use to historians, students of merchandising, and those interested in New York's golden age.

With electronic commerce growing exponentially, staying competitive through an effective e-business strategy is a tough challenge. Electronic commerce represents one of the most promising directions for generating competitive advantage at the micro level of the organization and for increasing productivity at the macro level of the economy. This is a study of the critical fundamental elements that could impact a user's perception of business-to-business and business-to-consumer electronic commerce. It examines key components and concepts of e-commerce, evaluating the critical success factors of global e-commerce, the economics of e-commerce, and the practical issues involved with e-commerce in various applications.

In 1867, less than three years after the Civil War left the city in ruins, Hungarian Jewish immigrant Morris Rich opened a small dry goods store on what is now Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta. Over time, his brothers Emanuel and Daniel joined the business; within a century, it became a retailing dynasty. Join historian Jeff Clemmons as he traces Rich's 137-year history. For the first time, learn the true stories behind Penelope Penn, Fashionata, The Great Tree, the Pink Pig, Rich's famous coconut cake and much more, including how events at the downtown Atlanta store helped John F. Kennedy become America's thirty-fifth president. With an eye for accuracy and exacting detail, Clemmons recounts the complete history of this treasured southern institution.

Grocery shopping is an often ignored part of the story of how food ultimately gets to our pantry shelves and tables. "A Theory of Grocery Shopping" explores the social organization of grocery shopping by linking the lived experience of grocery shoppers and retail managers in the US with information transmitted by nutritionists, government employees, financial advisors, journalists, health care providers and marketers, who influence the way we think about and perform the work of shopping for a household's food. The author provides insight into the contradictory messages that shape how consumers provision their households, and details how consumers respond to these messages. The book challenges the consumer choice model that places responsibility on the shopper for making the "right" choice at the grocery store, thereby ignoring the larger social forces at work, which determine what products are available and how they get to the shelves.

This book, the result of a symposium co-sponsored by several academic and professional organizations, provides information and insights useful for anyone aspiring to succeed in marketing to consumers in the 1990s. The book is unique in that it blends thoughtful commentaries of distinguished academics with the reasoned perspectives of executives of such firms as J. C. Penney, Avon, and Mary Kay in arriving at an agenda of critical propositions and issues relating to the nature and structure of retailing by the year 2000. What types of retailers will exist in the next century? How many retailers will there be? What will be the relationship between retailing and society? Questions such as these are asked and answered in the book. By focusing on likely trends in traditional retailing, direct marketing, direct selling, and multi-channel distribution networks, and overlaying these trends with the impact of technology and changing consumption patterns, the book provides a set of guidelines for achieving retailing success.

The book identifies the single-most important key to success in the remainder of this century--relationship management. Only by managing relationships between the firm and its customers, between the firm and its employees, and between employees and customers will a firm be able to survive in the 1990s. As the book notes, retail leaders in the next millennium will have learned to respect the lifetime value of both their customers and employees. The book concludes by identifying 25 conditions that will face retailers in the 1990s. These conditions, which range from hypersaturated markets to demographic trends (income polarization, smaller households, educational decline, more working women, time poverty), database marketing, show biz shopping, and concerned customers, are likely to both inhibit and facilitate retailing in the remainder of the century. Hence, the book should be of interest to business academics, business practitioners engaged in, or wanting to be engaged in, marketing to consumers, and anyone interested in the future of retailing from a societal or public policy perspective.

"A Theory of Shopping" offers a highly original perspective on one of our most basic everyday activities - shopping. We commonly assume that shopping is primarily concerned with individuals and materialism. But Miller rejects this assumption and follows the surprising route of analysing shopping by means of an analogy with anthropological studies of sacrificial ritual. He argues that the act of purchasing goods is almost always linked to other social relations, and most especially those based on love and care.

The ethnographic sections of the book are based on a year's study of shopping on a street in North London. This provides the basis for a sensitive description of the issues the shopper confronts when making decisions as to what to buy. Miller develops a theory to account for these observations, arguing that shopping typically consists of three major stages which reflect the three key stages of many rites of sacrifice. In both shopping and sacrifice the ultimate intention is to constitute others as desiring subjects. Finally the book examines certain historical shifts in both subjects and objects of devotion, in particular, ideals of gender and love.

This treatment of shopping from the perspective of comparative anthropology represents a highly innovative approach to one of the most familiar tasks of our daily lives. Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book will be of interest to students and academics in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anybody who wants to consider more deeply the nature of their own everyday activities.

This book tries to integrate the different arrangements devised in the MTS for small and large NMEs into one analytical framework and explores two sets of rules (GATT/WTO-minus and GATT/WTO-plus) along three historical stages (shaping, weakening and strengthening). The focal point of this book is to uncover the composition and structure of the NME treatment in the MTS, its evolving logic and process, and the nature and trend of the political-economic relations between NMEs and the MTS.

The story of Britain's market halls-built to replace traditional open-air markets throughout England, Wales, and Scotland-is a tale of exuberant architecture, civic pride, and attempts at social engineering. This book is the first history of the market hall, an immensely important building type that revolutionized the way Britons obtained their consumer goods. James Schmiechen and Kenneth Carls investigate the economic, cultural, political, and social forces that led to the construction of several hundred market buildings in the two centuries after 1750. The market hall was frequently vast in scale, revolutionary in plan, and elaborately ornamented-indeed, it was often the most important architectural statement a proud town might make. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary records, the authors show how municipal authorities used market buildings to improve the supply and distribution of food, convey social ideals, control social and economic behavior, and declare a town's virtues. For the Victorians, Schmiechen and Carls argue, the enormous investment of energy, seriousness, and funding in the market hall reflected a belief that architecture was a primary agent of social reform and improvement. Generously illustrated with more than 180 drawings and photographs, this book also includes a Gazetteer with information about some 300 specific market buildings. Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund

In today's world of galloping change, adjustment and anticipation have become ever more vital for retail operations. Many retailers have successfully anticipated change, while others have simply become relics of retailing history. Facing intense environmental competition, different types of retail institutions, whether a mass merchandiser or a hotel, find themselves confronting different types of challenges. The stories of a spectrum of retailers highlight the variables necessary for duplicating success and avoiding failure. This timely work provides a starting point for understanding the complexities and interrelationships in retail management.

Globalization has pushed the use of technology in business with advancing information and communication technology becoming a key factor in the future development of the retailing industry. Technology applications have significantly contributed to the exponential growth and profits of retailing institutions worldwide. ""Information Communication Technologies and Globalization of Retailing Applications"" critically examines the synergy of technology use and conventional wisdom in retailing and explores contemporary changes determining higher customer value. Discussions in this book encompass strategy implications for managers to optimize their advantage in retailing through the application of ICT, bridging the customer-technology gap.

This volume discusses continuous improvement strategies of Japanese convenience store operators. The study highlights the efforts of companies operating under lean management systems to identify new, dynamic, firm-specific capabilities in highly competitive markets.

The continued advancement of globalization, increases in internet connectivity, compatibility of international payment systems, and adaptability of logistics and shipping processes have combined to contribute to the rapid growth of the cross-border e-commerce market. Due to these advancements and the ubiquitous presence of smartphones, consumer use of cross-border e-commerce is increasingly simplified, and thus, sellers are hardly restricted to a specific country in terms of promoting, selling, and shipping goods worldwide. The burgeoning opportunities, habits, and trends of shopping on cross-border e-commerce platforms have expedited the prospect of becoming a presence in the global market. This is true for enterprises of all sizes, especially for small? and medium?sized enterprises (SMEs) that want to add their footprint in the international market for the first time. Like any other industry, cross-border e-commerce has its specific economics and driving forces, but has different scopes, challenges, and trends due to the geographic and cultural expanse of relevant environments. Cross-Border E-Commerce Marketing and Management was conceptualized by identifying the scope of new complementary information with a comprehensive understanding of the issues and potential of cross-border e-commerce businesses. The authors believe that this book will not only fill the void in the current research but will also provide far-sighted vision and strategies, as it covers big data, artificial intelligence, IoT, supply chain management, and more. This book provides the necessary knowledge to managers to compete with the competitive market structure and ultimately contribute to the sustainable economic growth of a country. It works as a guideline for existing cross-border e-commerce managers to formulate individual strategies that combine to optimize the industry while keeping the enterprise competitive. This book is useful in both developed and developing country contexts. This publication is an ideal resource for academicians, policy makers, stakeholders, and cross-border e-commerce managers, especially from SMEs.

Continuous improvements in digitized practices have created opportunities for businesses to develop more streamlined processes. This not only leads to higher success in day-to-day production, but it also increases the overall success of businesses. E-Manufacturing and E-Service Strategies in Contemporary Organizations is a critical scholarly resource that explores the advances in cloud-based solutions in the service and manufacturing realms of corporations and promotes communication between customers and service providers and manufacturers. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics including smart manufacturing, internet banking, database system adoption, this book is geared towards researchers, professionals, managers, and academicians seeking current and relevant research on the improvement of cloud-based systems for manufacturing and service.

This book addresses concerns with the international trade and investment dispute settlement systems from a statist perspective, at a time when multilateralism is deeply questioned by the forces of mega-regionalism and political and economic contestation. In covering recent case law and theoretical discussions, the book's contributors analyze the particularities of statehood and the limitations of the dispute settlement systems to judge sovereign actors as autonomous regulators. From a democratic deficit coupled with a deficit of legitimacy in relation to the questionable professionalism, independence and impartiality of adjudicators to the lack of consistency of decisions challenging essential public policies, trade and investment disputes have proven controversial. These challenges call for a rethinking of why, how and what for, are States judged. Based on a "sovereignty modern" approach, which takes into account the latest evolutions of a globalized trade and investment law struggling to put people's expectations at its core, the book provides a comprehensive framework and truly original perspective linking the various facets of "judicial activity" to the specific yet encompassing character of international law and the rule of law in international society. In doing so, it covers a large variety of issues such as global judicial capacity building and judicial professionalism from an international and domestic comparative angle, trade liberalisation and States' legitimate rights and expectations to protect societal values, the legal challenges of being a State claimant, the uses and misuses of imported legal concepts and principles in multidisciplinary adjudications and, lastly, the need to reunify international law on a (human) rights based approach.