Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Volume 37, Issue 8
In this issue, we have two contributions from the USA and two from the UK on diverse topics from benchmarking US speciality retailers/food stores, to instore pricing promotions, to corporate culture.
The first paper, by Mohamed Mostafa, attempts to measure the relative efficiency of speciality retailers and food consumer stores in the USA through data envelopment analysis. Using cross-sectional data from 2007 drawn from the Fortune lists, 45 retailers were analysed, showing that several of them had sub-optimal performances indicating that efficiency improvements could be made throughout the retail sector of the USA.
The second paper, by Lan Xia and Kent Monroe examines the effects of consumers’ pre-purchase goals on their responses to price promotions. In a series of experiments designed to assess the reaction of consumers to a series of prompts on pre-purchase goals compared with consumers who were not prompted(for example, prompted to buy kitchen rolls in their weekly shop or not), they found that consumers with a pre-purchase goal were more likely to be attracted to a promotion than those without a goal. The pre-purchase sample tried to minimise losses in response to a promotion whereas the other sample emphasised gains.
The penultimate paper in this issue is by Thomas Reutterer and Christoph Teller on store format choice and shopping centre types. They use random utility theory analysing data from 408 consumers who patronise different store formats in Austria (predominantly those operated by Spar and Rewe). In terms of consumers’ store format choice decisions, they chose discounters and hypermarkets for major trips whereas small supermarkets are preferred for“fill in” trips where personal service and store atmosphere are of more utility to consumers.
Our final paper is by Simon Booth and Kristian Hamer from Henley Business School in the UK. They discuss the corporate culture and financial performance in the context of a major UK retailer. They used employee survey data to measure the attitudes and perceptions of employees on key success factors as derived by management (100,000 responses). The sales data were used to provide an index of sales intensity to measure sales performance. Overall, the major empirical finding was that retail formats were more important in predicting sales intensity than a strong culture and the authors conclude that the strong culture thesis is one-dimensional and simplistic.
John Fernie
