European Retail Digest articles from June 2004

European Retail Digest archives from June 2004

Editorial.
June 22, 2004... We plead for forgiveness from our non-UK readers for an initial degree of introspection in this Editorial. The spring and summer of 2004 provided not a little excitement for the otherwise jaded retail watcher in the UK. The acquisitive...

Management in international retailing (1).(Feature: retail internationalisation)
June 22, 2004... Human resource management in multinational retailing is a particular challenge. There are well known debates about how much a format or a product line needs to be adapted to local conditions when a retailer goes international. We hear much less...

International market entry: management competencies and environmental influences.(Feature)
June 22, 2004... Introduction The market entry methods used by international retail companies are usually considered with reference to factors of control, cost and risk (Burt, 1993; Doherty, 2000a). This continuum owes much to Treadgold's (1988) early...

Retailer country of origin effects in Estonia: a longitudinal study.(Feature)
June 22, 2004... Introduction The focus of this article is to discuss a little-explored field of retail research; country of origin (COO) effects. The geographic area of study is the Republic of Estonia. This article examines the role of COO effects in how...

Comparing approaches to diversity management in UK and US retail.(Feature)
June 22, 2004... Introduction Interest in managing employee and customer diversity has been prompted by a number of factors. More women of all ages are in employment, increasingly people are likely to be working beyond retirement age, and the workforce is...

Retail franchising as a growth strategy.
June 22, 2004... Franchising has been described as a contractual system that allows an organisation to develop and expand its business without the need for high capital expenditure. Franchising has been one of the fastest growing segments of retailing in the...

This retailing life: interview with Fran Cotton, managing director and Steve Smith, wholesale director and joint founders of Cotton Traders.(Interviews)
June 22, 2004... Cotton Traders began in 1987 selling rugby shirts for casual wear through advertisements in Sunday newspapers. Cotton Traders is now one of the UK's leading leisurewear brands with an annual turnover of 55m [pounds sterling]. The range of...

The elements of retailing: interview with Beverley Nielsen, managing director of Fired Earth Interiors.(Interview)
June 22, 2004... Fired Earth was the inspiration of Nicholas Kneale. The company began in 1984 importing tiles to the UK domestic market and has moved from tiles into natural flooring, later adding paint, rugs and fabrics and then more recent additions of...

Shopping with attitude: how citizen-consumers are behind a radical overhaul of the Co-op Brand.(Regional review: British Isles)
June 22, 2004... Shopping with Attitude: How citizen-consumers are behind a radical overhaul of the Co-op Brand Ten years ago the Co-op conducted the biggest ever survey of consumer attitudes to the ethics of the food industry: 31,000 people (30,000 Coop...

Small-scale, local and regional: the Waitrose locally produced initiative.(Regional review: British Isles)
June 22, 2004... In 1904, Wallace Waite, Arthur Rose and David Taylor opened the first Waitrose in West London. Waitrose is now part of the John Lewis Partnership and is therefore owned by its 34,000 'partners' in over 150 stores in the UK. Waitrose owns and...

The centre for the study of retailing in Scotland.
June 22, 2004... Retailing is an important and vibrant sector of the Scottish economy. Despite its contribution to everyday life, sparse and incomplete data and a lack of national focus inhibit the understanding of the sector in Scotland. There are features of...

Food retailing in Northern Ireland: a tour around the monuments.
June 22, 2004... An Historical Perspective Cohen & Jones (1978) referred to a "... dramatic metamorphosis..." in retailing and nowhere has this metamorphosis been more in evidence than in the food retailing sector in Northern Ireland. In 1995, after...

Retail fraud: how to out-think shrink.
June 22, 2004... Retailers do not need reminding that loss due to theft, fraud, error and faulty processes, is a huge problem. Even companies that have security strategies in place are losing millions straight off the bottom line, year after year after year....

EU: political issues for the UK.(Political Issues)
June 22, 2004... The EU is right back at the centre of UK politics. The two driving issues are the Constitution and immigration. There is also concern about the control of working time. The Constitution Valery Giscard d'Estaing and his Convention...

Retail planning: development control or plan-led?
June 22, 2004... The last 18 months may in retrospect be seen as something of a watershed in the field of retail planning in the UK. There has perhaps been an unprecedented sense of change. Whether this leads to anything substantive is another matter, but there...

Competitive advantage through Enterprise Resource Planning.(News Analysis)
June 22, 2004... It is generally agreed that one of the biggest problems facing retailers is creating processes that enable all parts of the business to work together to improve key functions such as buying, merchandising, store allocation, replenishment and...

European convenience retailing: a changing market.(News)
June 22, 2004... [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Convenience retailing plays an increasingly strategic role for the major grocery retailers in Europe, and many of the European players have now diversified their operations into this sector. As a result, the shape of the...

Letter: America.
June 22, 2004... Dear Reader United States retailing is going through one of its periodic eras of upheaval and renewal. Just when most observers had written off department stores, the grand dames of retailing are showing renewed resiliency. From...

Letter: China.
June 22, 2004... Dear Reader The Chinese retail market continues to expand very rapidly, with recent surveys showing that the largest retailers have recorded very significant increases in sales over the last year or so. Nationally, official retail sales...

Letter: Australia.
June 22, 2004... Dear Reader Australian marketers and the retail industry continue to face significant challenges from global and local perspectives. Obesity Like many countries around the world, the largest issue receiving almost daily front page...

Supermarket squeeze: how fresh produce supply chain management is undermining workers' rights.(Viewpoint)
June 22, 2004... Farm workers march through Cape Town in February 2004, calling on European supermarkets to improve labour conditions on the farms. "The only ham left in the sandwich is our labour costs. If the supermarkets squeeze us, it's the only place...

Conference review: IGD 5th annual global retailing conference, London, July 2004.
June 22, 2004... IGD never seem to run out of things to say about global retailing, as their 5th annual conference on global retailing proved. The message from the conference must be to 'keep it simple'. Chairman of IGD, Joanne Denny-Finch introduced reducing...

Conference review: 20th International Conference of the French Marketing Association, Saint Malo, May 2004.
June 22, 2004... Each year, the French Marketing Association (Association Francaise du Marketing or AFM in French) organises in France or in a French speaking country (e.g. Quebec in 2000, Tunisia in 2003) a conference. This conference contributes to the...