Word: retailing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While this might sound like a lofty goal for an outfit in the business of selling things like eye-makeup remover, it is one that more and more merchants are aiming to achieve. From department stores to specialty chains to boutiques, retailers are deciding that the way to get customers into the stores is to make the shopping environment less forbidding, more theatrical and more fun. Some call it "retail-tainment" and hope it will counter the rising threat from Internet shopping sites, low-priced outlet malls and the feeling among time-pressed shoppers that fighting your way through...
Nancy Stone, a Virginia-based retail consultant, notes that such efforts at customer service fell into disuse back in the 1980s, when commercial real estate prices soared and retailers became obsessed with packing more merchandise into stores. Smart retailers now aim to "give the customer a feeling of familiarity, keep her in the store, make her linger," says Stone. Even small amenities like a coffee bar, says Martin Pegler, a professor of merchandising at Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology, can make customers feel more comfortable in a store. "It's not giggles and bubblegum and balloons," says Pegler...
Indeed, the goal of making stores inviting and confusion free has been reflected in store design. The notion of austere, open space--all the rage in chic urban boutiques during the '80s and early '90s--is now coming to an end, in the opinion of Paul Bennett, a retail architect who has designed shops for DKNY and Anne Klein. "Now the design has to be more welcoming, more intimate," he says. Bennett, who is working on shops for Calvin Klein's CK division, has helped popularize the concept of "zoning"--the creation of a series of small spaces within...
...when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line and mass production, making ours a consumer as well as an industrial society. As the century progressed, the service economy began to compete with industry as fortunes were made in soft drinks (Coca-Cola), processed foods (Heinz), insurance (Travelers, AIG) and retail (Sears, Wal-Mart). The information age began in the 1920s, when Walt Disney, Louis B. Mayer and the rest of Hollywood began to build businesses of scale. But it wasn't until the 1950s, with the emergence of television as a mass medium, and the two most recent decades, with...
While both more used texts and retail competition may ease the burden on some students to some degree, more significant change can only really occur as the publishing industry evolves, and fundamental change may not be that far away...