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Retail location: A micro-scale perspective
Book reviews
Retail Location: Perspective
A
Micro-Scale
Stephen Brown Avebury
Aldershot
315 pp
There are many reasons why people write academic treatises. Some do it to present new paradigms. Others provide new facts and insights. Yet a third reason is to provide a review of the literature for other scholars. It is this last reason that motivated Stephen Brown to write a book on retail location. Students of retail location do not look at the phenomenon through a single lens. Their diverse academic backgrounds are reflected in the types of questions they ask and the paradigms they use to answer them. The author has chosen to organize these diverse contributions under three broad headings - neoclassical, behavioral, and structuralist - that parallel the post-war paradigm shifts in geography. Each of these approaches is dealt with in a separate chapter in the book. These three chapters comprise the main body of the book. An introduction and a relatively short conclusion are also included. The first of the three main chapters is titled ‘Neoclassical approaches’. In search of reasons why retail stores agglomerate, the chapter reviews the literature on central place theory, bid-rent theory and spatial competition for answers. The chapter provides a wonderful summary of the theoretical as well as the empirical work in these areas. The review is comprehensive, but there is minimal synthesis of the literature. The next chapter deals with behavioral perspectives. Critical of the ‘unproven behavioral assumptions’ of the central place theory and the simplicity of the behavioral assumptions used in the spatial competition literature, in this chapter the author provides a detailed summary of empirical studies of retail consumer behavior. The chapter takes a broad sweep of the literature: it covers theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of behavioral, cognitive and humanistic approaches to the study of retail consumer behavior. By
using selected empirical observations to challenge the reader’s imagination the author skillfully manages to keep the reader’s interest. For those searching for a taxonomy of this vast literature this is an invaluable chapter. The third main chapter deals with two very different streams of literature that have been put under the label of ‘structuralist studies’. The structurahst paradigm in geography contends that the ‘patterns of human activity cannot be comprehended by analysis of the patterns themselves but only by the study of the underpinning socioeconomic processes that give rise to them’. As the author notes, many structuralists believe that the observed patterns can be explained only by understanding how surplus capital created by the prevailing mode of production is circulated and concentrated in space. This viewpoint has won many adherents in geography, yet has earned little space in this volume. The reason, according to the author, is that retailing has been ‘largely untouched by this whirlwind (of the Marxian paradigm that has swept the study of industrial location)‘. Although it is true that strict Marxian reinterpretations of retail spatial structures have so far been nonexistent, recent studies have placed much more emphasis on the sociopolitical and economic context of the evolution of retail structures. If this book has a lacuna, it is this. What this chapter focuses on is the impact of retailers’ strategies on spatial patterns. The discussions range from the impact of market penetration and expansion strategies of retail chains to the development of shopping centers and government and regulatory influences. This book is different from earlier volumes on retail location. Most of the recent volumes on retail location have tended to focus on methodological issues of market area delimitation, market share estimation and site assessment. This volume, on the other hand, is more similar to the ‘retailing geography’ genre of books from the 1970s. Yet, it is different. As the author notes in his preface, the analysis of retail location at the micro scale - siting of outlets within planned
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 1994 Volume I Number 2
shopping centers and shopping districts - has mostly been absent in earlier works. This volume fills an important gap in the literature. In 300 pages the author has presented the vista of retail location research drawn with a broad brush. This is perhaps the most comprehensive review of the literature on retail location that one can possibly find there are more than 65 pages of bibliographic references from both sides of the Atlantic. True to the title the discussion has a special microscale perspective, but it is not limited to that perspective. Nor, as discussed earlier, is it limited to any one methodological approach. The author has searched far and wide in both space and time to provide the comprehensive review he promised in his preface. The review is organized in useful taxonomies that mirror the twists and turns in paradigms, research questions and methodologies. The text will prove useful to retail scholars - especially those interested in retail location. For this, on behalf of the profession, I thank the author. The detailed cataloging of previous studies, while providing a valuable resource, has left one casualty. It is hard to hear the voice of the author. Except for a few remarks here and there, the author has refrained from providing an assessment of different research paradigms or their usefulness for future studies. I wished the author had shared his personal perspectives more with the reader. For example, the bulk of the empirical work on central place theory was done during 1960s and 1970s. What is the author’s assessment of these efforts? How valuable is this paradigm likely to be in the future? (Personally, I find these models too static and lacking in evolutionary details. The rewards from extending these models without sacrificing their limiting structure - such as the attempts to create new spatial configurations by allowing the simultaneous operation of various organizing principles - can only be marginal.) To take another example: why is the advent of catastrophe and chaos theory ‘much-lauded?’ The author presents a research agenda in the concluding chapter. He 117
Book
reviecrv
is hopeful that time will bring more empirical reality into sophisticated neoclassical models. He argues that many of the shortcomings of the carlier ‘classical’ models, which led to the abandonment of these models, have since been resolved. However, the evidence of such resolution is hard to find. The author also calls for a comprehensive comparison of observed and reported consumer on the one hand, and behaviors, retailers’ perceptions of consumer behavior, on the other. Other items on his agenda are the exploration of consumer cognition of planned. shopping environments. suburban analyses of consumer attitudes to the components of shopping districts, and additional analyses of the ‘qualitative’ side of the retail milieu. Finally, he calls for renewed research in understanding the influence of micro-site characteristics on retail success. Avijit Ghosh New York Universit)
Retail Buying 4th edn Jay Diamond and Gerald Pintel Regents/Prentice Hall New Jersey 3 70 pp Texts on retail buying are most welcome in the current environment of profound retail change. This text is a fourth edition and includes updated material, such as a consideration of the duties and responsibilities of buyers for catalogues and cable telcvision. At the outset, it must be stated that the text is exclusively American in its case approach and includes no material or details of buying in nonUS countries. Given the different national retail cultures, the text has little relevance for a UK buyer. The 16 chapters examine the role 01 retail buyers in a specifically US context. Chapters include the role of the buyer in chain stores, specialized department stores, catalogues and home-buying networks and resident buying offices. Section II considers the fundamentals of effective buying: the 118
usual questions of what, how, from whom and when. It examines the growth of off-price retailers. (For those readers not familiar with the terminology. ‘off-price’ should not be confused with discounting: it refers to buying cheaper than the wholesale cost and passing on the savings to the consumer. The ability to negotiate is critical. as often is timing of buying and the willingness to purchase a limited assortment. Off-price retailing accounts for 10% of US retail sales.) Buying from foreign markets and importing are included. Additional buyer responsibilitics are considered in Section III. These include pricing, private label and promotional activities. The mention of private labels raises one of the serious limitations of the book: its exclusive US focus. Private brand has played a central role in the ‘retailer as a brand’ development in the UK. Diamond and Pintel show its key US role to be *the most significant method of combating off-price merchandising’. The chapters arc clearly structured with text. action for small-store buyers (a welcome inclusion). summary of key points and review questions. plus two or three very short casts. Retailing is a most exciting marketplace in the IYYOs. Two of its dynamic characteristics arc changing competitivc positioning and internationalization. There is very little of these in this text. The role of the buyer would be important in both these areas. The authors have a problem in that in the retailing mark&place there is no typical buyer and probably no typical retail organization. Perhaps to cope with this. the text makes the whole process of retail buying sound dull. prosaic and predictable. It is arguably none of those things. The problem may arise from the target audience for the text. 1 have found it difficult to assess this. It is certainly not (to use UK terminology) university level. Its lone is too often patronising and downright childish. For example, when discussing the need for political neutrality in buying abroad: In America we are often thrown into battle when we enter the world of politics. Most professional business-
people are aware that political diffcrences are taboo in most business discussions. Although a good session with friends could become heated, generally all parties kiss and make up and resume their friendships. Many an offshore deal has been damaged, however, when politics arc explored... While it is prudent to understand the political philosophies of each country to which buying visits are made. it is important to play a neutral role. In the United States we openly and freely criticize our president and other leaders, but in some countries this is unacccptable. Citizens of Great Britain typically justify anything the Royal Family does, no matter how distastcful it might appear. The only time that the text came alive and generated any cxcitemcnt for mc was in the chapter on ‘Buying for catalogs and home buying networks’. and this may be for the reason that the US cataloguc and home shopping scene is ahead of the UK. It is one of the new chapters and appeared less patronising and less mechanical in its tone. More worrying than the tone arc the omissions. There is little significant treatment of the newer information technology developments in retailing, such as the sophisticated use of electronic point-of-sale information. and direct product profitability. Profitability (critical for buyers) is discussed largely in the chapter on ‘Merchandise pricing’ (Chapter 14) in terms of mark-ups and mark-downs. It is not until Chapter 8 that supplicrslvendors or relationships with suppliers arc mentioned, and then only half a page is given to vendor cooperation. This is in terms of the advantage to the buyer of developing key resources. To achieve this ‘it is important to the vendor’s operation that the buyer give a definite answer as soon as possible’ or ‘buyers should not be involved in having one vendor copy the merchandise of another‘. This one sided view of the buyer’s role leaves out the important i&es of buyer-supplier relationships and all the retailer advantages that can accrue, from, for example category management. Category management is unimaginable in the terms of this text.
Retail Location: Perspective
A
Micro-Scale
Stephen Brown Avebury
Aldershot
315 pp
There are many reasons why people write academic treatises. Some do it to present new paradigms. Others provide new facts and insights. Yet a third reason is to provide a review of the literature for other scholars. It is this last reason that motivated Stephen Brown to write a book on retail location. Students of retail location do not look at the phenomenon through a single lens. Their diverse academic backgrounds are reflected in the types of questions they ask and the paradigms they use to answer them. The author has chosen to organize these diverse contributions under three broad headings - neoclassical, behavioral, and structuralist - that parallel the post-war paradigm shifts in geography. Each of these approaches is dealt with in a separate chapter in the book. These three chapters comprise the main body of the book. An introduction and a relatively short conclusion are also included. The first of the three main chapters is titled ‘Neoclassical approaches’. In search of reasons why retail stores agglomerate, the chapter reviews the literature on central place theory, bid-rent theory and spatial competition for answers. The chapter provides a wonderful summary of the theoretical as well as the empirical work in these areas. The review is comprehensive, but there is minimal synthesis of the literature. The next chapter deals with behavioral perspectives. Critical of the ‘unproven behavioral assumptions’ of the central place theory and the simplicity of the behavioral assumptions used in the spatial competition literature, in this chapter the author provides a detailed summary of empirical studies of retail consumer behavior. The chapter takes a broad sweep of the literature: it covers theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of behavioral, cognitive and humanistic approaches to the study of retail consumer behavior. By
using selected empirical observations to challenge the reader’s imagination the author skillfully manages to keep the reader’s interest. For those searching for a taxonomy of this vast literature this is an invaluable chapter. The third main chapter deals with two very different streams of literature that have been put under the label of ‘structuralist studies’. The structurahst paradigm in geography contends that the ‘patterns of human activity cannot be comprehended by analysis of the patterns themselves but only by the study of the underpinning socioeconomic processes that give rise to them’. As the author notes, many structuralists believe that the observed patterns can be explained only by understanding how surplus capital created by the prevailing mode of production is circulated and concentrated in space. This viewpoint has won many adherents in geography, yet has earned little space in this volume. The reason, according to the author, is that retailing has been ‘largely untouched by this whirlwind (of the Marxian paradigm that has swept the study of industrial location)‘. Although it is true that strict Marxian reinterpretations of retail spatial structures have so far been nonexistent, recent studies have placed much more emphasis on the sociopolitical and economic context of the evolution of retail structures. If this book has a lacuna, it is this. What this chapter focuses on is the impact of retailers’ strategies on spatial patterns. The discussions range from the impact of market penetration and expansion strategies of retail chains to the development of shopping centers and government and regulatory influences. This book is different from earlier volumes on retail location. Most of the recent volumes on retail location have tended to focus on methodological issues of market area delimitation, market share estimation and site assessment. This volume, on the other hand, is more similar to the ‘retailing geography’ genre of books from the 1970s. Yet, it is different. As the author notes in his preface, the analysis of retail location at the micro scale - siting of outlets within planned
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 1994 Volume I Number 2
shopping centers and shopping districts - has mostly been absent in earlier works. This volume fills an important gap in the literature. In 300 pages the author has presented the vista of retail location research drawn with a broad brush. This is perhaps the most comprehensive review of the literature on retail location that one can possibly find there are more than 65 pages of bibliographic references from both sides of the Atlantic. True to the title the discussion has a special microscale perspective, but it is not limited to that perspective. Nor, as discussed earlier, is it limited to any one methodological approach. The author has searched far and wide in both space and time to provide the comprehensive review he promised in his preface. The review is organized in useful taxonomies that mirror the twists and turns in paradigms, research questions and methodologies. The text will prove useful to retail scholars - especially those interested in retail location. For this, on behalf of the profession, I thank the author. The detailed cataloging of previous studies, while providing a valuable resource, has left one casualty. It is hard to hear the voice of the author. Except for a few remarks here and there, the author has refrained from providing an assessment of different research paradigms or their usefulness for future studies. I wished the author had shared his personal perspectives more with the reader. For example, the bulk of the empirical work on central place theory was done during 1960s and 1970s. What is the author’s assessment of these efforts? How valuable is this paradigm likely to be in the future? (Personally, I find these models too static and lacking in evolutionary details. The rewards from extending these models without sacrificing their limiting structure - such as the attempts to create new spatial configurations by allowing the simultaneous operation of various organizing principles - can only be marginal.) To take another example: why is the advent of catastrophe and chaos theory ‘much-lauded?’ The author presents a research agenda in the concluding chapter. He 117
Book
reviecrv
is hopeful that time will bring more empirical reality into sophisticated neoclassical models. He argues that many of the shortcomings of the carlier ‘classical’ models, which led to the abandonment of these models, have since been resolved. However, the evidence of such resolution is hard to find. The author also calls for a comprehensive comparison of observed and reported consumer on the one hand, and behaviors, retailers’ perceptions of consumer behavior, on the other. Other items on his agenda are the exploration of consumer cognition of planned. shopping environments. suburban analyses of consumer attitudes to the components of shopping districts, and additional analyses of the ‘qualitative’ side of the retail milieu. Finally, he calls for renewed research in understanding the influence of micro-site characteristics on retail success. Avijit Ghosh New York Universit)
Retail Buying 4th edn Jay Diamond and Gerald Pintel Regents/Prentice Hall New Jersey 3 70 pp Texts on retail buying are most welcome in the current environment of profound retail change. This text is a fourth edition and includes updated material, such as a consideration of the duties and responsibilities of buyers for catalogues and cable telcvision. At the outset, it must be stated that the text is exclusively American in its case approach and includes no material or details of buying in nonUS countries. Given the different national retail cultures, the text has little relevance for a UK buyer. The 16 chapters examine the role 01 retail buyers in a specifically US context. Chapters include the role of the buyer in chain stores, specialized department stores, catalogues and home-buying networks and resident buying offices. Section II considers the fundamentals of effective buying: the 118
usual questions of what, how, from whom and when. It examines the growth of off-price retailers. (For those readers not familiar with the terminology. ‘off-price’ should not be confused with discounting: it refers to buying cheaper than the wholesale cost and passing on the savings to the consumer. The ability to negotiate is critical. as often is timing of buying and the willingness to purchase a limited assortment. Off-price retailing accounts for 10% of US retail sales.) Buying from foreign markets and importing are included. Additional buyer responsibilitics are considered in Section III. These include pricing, private label and promotional activities. The mention of private labels raises one of the serious limitations of the book: its exclusive US focus. Private brand has played a central role in the ‘retailer as a brand’ development in the UK. Diamond and Pintel show its key US role to be *the most significant method of combating off-price merchandising’. The chapters arc clearly structured with text. action for small-store buyers (a welcome inclusion). summary of key points and review questions. plus two or three very short casts. Retailing is a most exciting marketplace in the IYYOs. Two of its dynamic characteristics arc changing competitivc positioning and internationalization. There is very little of these in this text. The role of the buyer would be important in both these areas. The authors have a problem in that in the retailing mark&place there is no typical buyer and probably no typical retail organization. Perhaps to cope with this. the text makes the whole process of retail buying sound dull. prosaic and predictable. It is arguably none of those things. The problem may arise from the target audience for the text. 1 have found it difficult to assess this. It is certainly not (to use UK terminology) university level. Its lone is too often patronising and downright childish. For example, when discussing the need for political neutrality in buying abroad: In America we are often thrown into battle when we enter the world of politics. Most professional business-
people are aware that political diffcrences are taboo in most business discussions. Although a good session with friends could become heated, generally all parties kiss and make up and resume their friendships. Many an offshore deal has been damaged, however, when politics arc explored... While it is prudent to understand the political philosophies of each country to which buying visits are made. it is important to play a neutral role. In the United States we openly and freely criticize our president and other leaders, but in some countries this is unacccptable. Citizens of Great Britain typically justify anything the Royal Family does, no matter how distastcful it might appear. The only time that the text came alive and generated any cxcitemcnt for mc was in the chapter on ‘Buying for catalogs and home buying networks’. and this may be for the reason that the US cataloguc and home shopping scene is ahead of the UK. It is one of the new chapters and appeared less patronising and less mechanical in its tone. More worrying than the tone arc the omissions. There is little significant treatment of the newer information technology developments in retailing, such as the sophisticated use of electronic point-of-sale information. and direct product profitability. Profitability (critical for buyers) is discussed largely in the chapter on ‘Merchandise pricing’ (Chapter 14) in terms of mark-ups and mark-downs. It is not until Chapter 8 that supplicrslvendors or relationships with suppliers arc mentioned, and then only half a page is given to vendor cooperation. This is in terms of the advantage to the buyer of developing key resources. To achieve this ‘it is important to the vendor’s operation that the buyer give a definite answer as soon as possible’ or ‘buyers should not be involved in having one vendor copy the merchandise of another‘. This one sided view of the buyer’s role leaves out the important i&es of buyer-supplier relationships and all the retailer advantages that can accrue, from, for example category management. Category management is unimaginable in the terms of this text.