Shopping Tourism, Retailing and Leisure provides a comprehensive examination of the relationships between tourism, leisure, shopping, and retailing. Critical issues are examined within the framework of the dichotomous relationship between utilitarian and hedonic forms of shopping, shopping as a primary and secondary attraction in tourist destinations, the development of various tourist-retail venues, the role of souvenirs in tourism, and management issues (e.g. merchandising, venue design, and customer service).

Following the journey of eight bargain store objects, Alison Hulme reveals the complex story behind society's simplest and cheapest commodities. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, On the Commodity Trail explores the colourful and fascinating histories of everyday objects.Along the way, we observe raw materials on municipal rubbish dumps in China, newly re-made products in the world's largest wholesale market, and take a journey across the seas, to bargain stores in Europe and North America, arriving finally in the homes of consumers. Weaving together narratives from the people we meet at different parts of the commodity chain - waste peddlers, wholesalers, store owners, and shoppers - the book examines the places and people at the heart of these localized yet immense global networks.Unlike other investigations of commodity chains, this study does not chart a straightforward trajectory from production to consumption. Instead, it demonstrates that the low-end commodity chain is one of constant rupture in which products are made and re-made, blurring the dividing line between producing and consuming.An ethnography of material culture as well as an examination of commodity culture at a time of economic downturn, this deeply-engrossing book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of commodity chains and consumer culture.

"Small Store Survival should challenge retailers' views of small store retailing by questioning key areas of business. What is the vision for the store in 10 years? How have the customers changed over the past few years? How current are the managers about what customers genuinely like and dislike? What is being done to attract, educate, and motivate the best retail talent in the area? How effective is the merchandising strategy? What plans exist for succession?

"The real lesson of this study is that the best retailers never stop learning. They never stop growing. They never lose their enthusiasm for the customers and the business. And they never cease to revel in change and the chance to deal with it." —from the Executive Summary of Small Store Survival

Small Store Survival

Over the past decade, thousands of small retail stores have fallen victim to overwhelming competition from huge discount chains determined to take in every retail dollar in sight. But not everyone succumbs to the megastore invasion; many small retailers grow and prosper in spite of this cutthroat competition. How do they do it? Even more important, how can you do it?

Small Store Survival is the how-to book that belongs behind the counter of every independent retail store. It analyzes small-store operation in detail and lays out optimal survival strategies and tactics for seven key areas of business practice that are critical to success: customer service, marketing, merchandising, store operations, management, human resources, and finance. Its clear and logical organization enables you to evaluate your business practices function by function, identify strengths and weaknesses, and develop action plans to improve operations in each of these crucial functions.

Written by a team of experts from Arthur Andersen LLP, this guide presents detailed solutions and best practices culled from retailer surveys, site visits, and industry research. Its recommendations are applicable to a broad variety of retail formats, including stores that specialize in apparel; appliances; books; drugs, health, and beauty care products; electronics; hardware; home and garden supplies; pets and pet supplies; as well as other specialty stores. Numerous case studies illustrate the problems that plague many retailers and demonstrate ways you can overcome these obstacles and improve your business. You'll learn how to:

• Identify customer expectations and meet or exceed them at every turn
• Identify, pursue, and capture a distinct customer market
• Establish a vision and culture for your store, plan where the company needs to go, and take steps to get there
• Compete for quality employees and, once you hire them, keep them
• Establish budgetary controls and contain costs
• Negotiate effectively for favorable terms from vendors and suppliers

The most successful retailers never stop learning, growing, and adapting to changing circumstances. The hundreds of sound ideas presented in this study were developed and implemented by the most successful small store operators in the industry. Here is your chance to learn and grow with them by adapting these solutions to your own business needs.

Uncovering how cash-in-hand economies are composed of not only the underground sector (work akin to formal employment conducted for profit-motivated purposes), but also a hidden economy of favours more akin to mutual aid, this book displays the need to transcend conventional market-oriented readings of cash-in-hand work and radically rethink whether seeking its eradication through tougher regulations is always appropriate. It argues for a variegated policy approach that recognizes these two distinct forms of cash-in-hand work and which tailors policy accordingly.

To beat your competitors you must know exactly what they are doing. It is impossible to put together a successful competitive strategy if you are unsure what your competitors are doing, what they plan to do or even who your competitors really are. As markets evolve even more rapidly and companies adapt their plans much faster, the demand for competitive intelligence has spiralled. Christopher West, an expert in the field, shows you how to collect, analyse and use competitive intelligence from a variety of sources, including the internet, and change your competitive strategy accordingly.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Electronic Commerce, ISEC 2001, held in Hong Kong, China in April 2001.The eight revised full papers presented together with four short papers and two survey papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The book offers topical sections on secure payment, trust and security, tools for e-commerce applications, e-commerce frameworks and systems, performance and QoS, and e-commerce surveys.

This book presents 12 revised full papers on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce: seven papers were initially presented at the AMEC 2000 Workshop and the five others were solicited by the volume editors in order to achieve competent coverage of all relevant topics.The book is divided in topical sections on electronic negotiation models for agents, formal issues for agents operating on electronic market places, virtual trading institutions and platforms, and trading strategies for interrelated transactions.

This book documents the efforts undertaken by the EG AgentLink Special Interest Group on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce, SIG AMEC.First and foremost, the book presents a roadmap of research and current technological development in the area of agent mediated electronic commerce. A particularly interesting part of this roadmap is the joint perspective on future developments.The book also contains a number of papers that fill in parts of this roadmap in a European context. Some of the papers present significant current R&D results while other papers indicate some clear directions for future research. The book is structured in topical sections on negotiation, markets, user preferences, and security.

This book, based upon a large-scale research project, examines alternative types of exchange rate policies being pursued and the changing nature of exchange rate policy during the transition process in four countries, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Poland and the Czech Republic. The book brings together a series of original contributions by country experts and draws out some common themes and over-arching policy implications for the operation of exchange rate policy in the transition process.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Electronic Commerce, WELCOM 2001, held in Heidelberg, Germany in November 2001.The 17 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on trade and markets, security and trust, auctions, profiling, and business interaction.

This volume includes the papers accepted for the First International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies, which was held in Greenwich, UK, on September 4-6, 2000. The conference is the first of a series of planned conferences on these topics with the goal to bring together researchers from academia, practitioners and commercial developers from industry, and users to assess current methodologies and explore new ideas in e-commerce and web technology. The conference attracted 120 papers from all over the world and each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members for its merit. The program committee finally selected 42 papers for presentation and inclusion in these conference proceedings. The conference program consisted of 14 technical sessions and two invited talks spread over three days. The regular sessions covered topics such as web application design, intellectual property rights, security and fairness, distributed organizations, web usage analysis, modelling of web applications, electronic commerce success factors, electronic markets, XML, web mining, electronic negotiation, integrity and performance, facilitating electronic commerce, and mobile electronic commerce. There were two invited addresses at the conference. The first was by Anthony Finkelstein, University College London, UK on "A Foolish Consistency: Technical Challenges in Consistency Management." This was a common address to the DEXA, the DaWaK and the EC-Web attendees. The second talk was by Paul Timmers, European Commission, Information Technologies Directorate on "The Role of Technology for the e-Economy."

Among the many changes brought by the Internet is the emergence of electronic commerce over the Web. E-commerce activities, such as the online exchange of information, services, and products, are opening up completely new opportunities for business, at new levels of productivity and profitability. In parallel with the emergence of e-commerce, intelligent software agents as entities capable of independent action in open, unpredictable environments have matured into a promising new technology. Quite naturally, e-commerce agents hold great promise for exploiting the Internet's full potential as an electronic marketplace. The 20 coherently written chapters in this book by leading researchers and professionals present the state of the art in agent-mediated e-commerce. Researchers, professionals, and advanced students interested in e-commerce or agent technology will find this book an indispensable source of information and reference.

The new digital economy has pronounced implications for corporate strategy, marketing, operations, information systems, customer service, global supply-chain management, and product distribution. This handbook examines most aspects of electronic commerce, including electronic storefronts, online business, consumer interface, business-to-business networking, digital payment, legal issues, information product development, and electronic business models. An indispensable reference for professionals in e-commerce and Internet business.

Mediaplanung ist ein Instrument, um Kommunikationsziele durch geeignete Auswahl der Werbetrager moglichst kostengunstig zu realisieren. Die Autoren zeigen, wie sich Mediaplanung in die Marketingkommunikation integrieren lasst: als Entscheidungsprozess hinsichtlich Mediaselektion und Marktsegmentierung, Zielbestimmung, Kommunikationsinhalte und Budgetierung. Ein betrachtlicher Teil des Buchs ist der Mediaforschung sowie den verschiedenen Mediagattungen gewidmet. Dabei werden aktuelle Entwicklungen und Daten der relevanten Medien berucksichtigt."

Endorsed by the Chartered Banker Institute as core reading for the Personal and Private Banking module, Retail and Digital Banking looks at the changes that have occurred, including developments in onshore and offshore operations, call centres and the impact of technology and other critical factors in retail and digital banking. This book considers the evolution of retail banking services and the major role that technology has played in providing quality, cost-effective services to consumers. This fascinating text then goes on to offer expert thought leadership on the future of retail banking and what this could mean for existing established banks and disruptive new entrants. Retail and Digital Banking offers readers the opportunity to take a step back and consider the evolution of the sector in which they work and the tremendous level of change that has occurred over time for all operational activity. Retail and Digital Banking provides support for the Personal and Private Banking module assessment and features practical case studies from the banking sector. This essential text brings the journey of modern banking to life and considers what the future holds. Online supporting resources include a glossary and updates to regulation.

A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed. Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life. Notebooks, records, and stationery have become cool again. Behold the Revenge of Analog. David Sax has uncovered story after story of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and even big corporations who've found a market selling not apps or virtual solutions but real, tangible things. As e-books are supposedly remaking reading, independent bookstores have sprouted up across the country. As music allegedly migrates to the cloud, vinyl record sales have grown more than ten times over the past decade. Even the offices of tech giants like Google and Facebook increasingly rely on pen and paper to drive their brightest ideas. Sax's work reveals a deep truth about how humans shop, interact, and even think. Blending psychology and observant wit with first-rate reportage, Sax shows the limited appeal of the purely digital life - and the robust future of the real world outside it.

Electronic Commerce, as a gamut of activities involving electronic transactions performed over a network via software that may be more or less autonomous, is an emerging reality. Strategic studies have shown that electronic commerce is a major growth industry.
The book is devoted to the challenges and opportunities that electronic commerce opens for agent technology. For some time, electronic commerce has attracted the avid attention of agent-builders and agent technology researchers, and these have decisively contributed to advancing the state of the art in the field. The second-generation software agents now entering the scene hold great promise for the further advancement of electronic commerce. This book originates from a workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Trading held at Agents'98 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 1998. The eleven carefully reviewed and revised papers present a unique survey of software agents in the context of electronic commerce.

This book considers the economic, social and political importance of the silk trade in Safavid Iran. It focuses on four aspects of this trade: the role of silk in Iranian commercial policy, the interaction between agents of the state and foreign merchants, the routes along which silk was transported and, critically, the economic and social difficulties that contributed to the collapse of the regime in the 1720s. This represents a major contribution to the current debates on the social and economic history of the premodern world.

The retail sector has undergone a major structural transformation in the past fifteen years and one aspect has been the enormous growth in airport retailing which now represents one of the major methods of profit generation for the airport authorities. With this trend set to continue, retailing will increasingly represent an important aspect of future airport development. In European Airport Retailing the authors set out to examine the contemporary and future developments in airport retailing, both from a strategic and operational perspective. Including coverage of both tax free and duty paid retailing, the book looks at such issues as retail marketing; location and design; supply chain relationships and human resource issues.

This book charts the history of Australian retail developments as well as examining the social and cultural dimensions of shopping in Australia. In the second half of the twentieth century, the shopping centre spread from America around the world. Australia was a very early adopter, and produced a unique shopping centre model. Situating Australian retail developments within a broader international and historical context, Managing the Marketplace demonstrates the ways that local conditions shape global retail forms. Knowledge transfer from Europe and America to Australia was a consistent feature of the Australian retail industry across the twentieth century. By critically examining the strengths and weaknesses of Australian retail firms' strategies across time, and drawing on the voices of both business elites and ordinary people, the book not only unearths the forgotten stories of Australian retail, it offers new insights into the opportunities and challenges that confront the sector today, both nationally and internationally. This book will be of interest to all scholars and practitioners of retail, marketing, business history and economic geography, as well as social and cultural history.

Managing productivity and profitability in retailing has taken on a particular role since the onset of the recession of the late 1980s. Productivity can be improved simply by rationalising low performing stores, merchandise ranges and by reducing the number of suppliers and employees. However, this is not necessarily a long term solution. The purpose of this text is to propose a means by which a more proactive approach may be taken to improving both productivity and profitability. The book develops a model based upon management ratios typically used in retailing businesses for planning and control purposes. The model encourages the use of existing performance data to evaluate overall company productivity and profitability together with performance characteristics of individual functions. An additional feature of the approach is the facility to explore the impact of changes to the retail offer suggested by customer research responses. To facilitate the use of the concepts and the model used, a disk is also available, containing the application of the model to a number of the case studies and a facility for the user to input their own data.

Branding Diversity considers how brands both reflect and affect contemporary discussions of cultural diversity. Advancing an innovative, critical perspective on advertising, the book challenges the latent assumption that advertisers are inherently conservative and reluctant to represent anything other than popularly agreeable scripts and narratives. On the contrary, advertising is now replete with progressive messaging. Through Budweiser, Gillette, Vogue and Patagonia, Susie Khamis demonstrates that such forays into the political realm are not just shrewd appraisals of popular causes, but also inevitable outcomes of contemporary media and politics. This book will be of interest to scholars in advertising studies, marketing communications and media studies.

Essentials of Modeling and Analytics illustrates how and why analytics can be used effectively by loss prevention staff. The book offers an in-depth overview of analytics, first illustrating how analytics are used to solve business problems, then exploring the tools and training that staff will need in order to engage solutions. The text also covers big data analytical tools and discusses if and when they are right for retail loss prevention professionals, and illustrates how to use analytics to test the effectiveness of loss prevention initiatives. Ideal for loss prevention personnel on all levels, this book can also be used for loss prevention analytics courses. Essentials of Modeling and Analytics was named one of the best Analytics books of all time by BookAuthority, one of the world's leading independent sites for nonfiction book recommendations.

Large and medium sized retailers have increased their international operations substantially over the last 25 years. This is evident in: the number of countries to which these retailers expand; the growing international sales of retailers; and the heightening of the level of commitment of retailers to their international activity - a trend that is likely to continue over the next decade as general globalization in the service industries increases. The managerial implications of the moves to become global are considerable. Different retailers are pursuing different approaches, to varying degrees of success and are no longer simply multi-national, but are also multi-continental. Consequently, existing concepts and theories of international business fit uneasily in explanations of international retailing, so new corporate strategies need to be explored. Featuring in-depth studies of seven retailers, by international scholars from Japan, the UK and Sweden, Global Strategies in Retailing explores recent developments in strategy that are related to international retailing and in particular, the emergence of a Global Portfolio Strategy. As such, this book will be important reading for all international business and retailing students and academics researching in these areas.