Retailing Developments in the Netherlands

In this paper, we want to describe the current trends in distribution and distribution research in the Netherlands. Because this is an extensive area, we restrain ourselves and focus on general economic developments that apply to shopping behaviour; on the regional distribution of stores and concentration trends; on shopping centre developments, on functional versus fun shopping for convenience goods and shopping/speciality goods, respectively; on price vs. service distribution and on store image research. In the discussion section, we conclude that psychological variables are necessary complements to economic variables in distribution research, and that only a few studies investigate actual shopping behaviour instead of perceptions and evaluations only.