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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb014450. When citing the article, please cite: Charles A. Ingene, Robert F. Lusch, (1979), “Estimation of a Department Store Production Function”, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Materials Management, Vol. 9 Iss: 6, pp. 272 - 284.

Retail trade, an essential component in any industrialised marketing system, has received relatively little attention on a macro level. Rather, the formal study of retail trade has been directed at helping retail managers improve the effectiveness of their decisions. Although such analysis is helpful to retail managers, it is of less use to government policy makers in formulating policy and to marketing academicians in their attempts to understand retailing on a broader level. If the retailing sector of the economy is to be better understood some major analytical questions which revolve around the productivity of retail trade must be answered. Importantly, the productivity of retail trade is not only of interest to government policy makers but also should be of interest to marketers because (1) the productivity of retailing is a significant component in influencing the cost of marketing goods, (2) as marketers we know almost nothing about the economic efficiency of retailing, and (3) it will give marketers the tools to help compare productivity in the retailing/marketing sectors of the economy to productivity in other sectors of the economy. The purpose of this paper is the estimation of a production function for department stores in the United States for the year 1972. During 1972, department store sales totalled $51·08 billion[l], comprising 11·1% of all retail sales. Only automobile dealerships, eating and drinking places, and food stores were a greater component of retail sales and only the latter employed more people. An understanding of one of the more important components of the US economy, retail trade, cannot occur in the absence of a thorough comprehension of its department store component (SIC 531).

Retailing is the marketing institution with which consumers have the most immediate and frequent contact. As such, consumers should be concerned with how the behaviour and performance of retailers will impact on them. While the consumer may not be explicitly aware of it, the rate of return (RoR) on capital invested in retailing has both instantaneous and temporal impacts on consumer well‐being. When the RoR is high, relative to the cost of capital, retail prices are probably higher than they need be. However, this high RoR may persuade other investors (i.e. potential retailers) to enter the market, thereby eventually lowering prices and increasing product availability.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance students’ ability to use theory to assess facts logically and creatively. To achieve this end, the author explicates the evolution of retailing from its pre-industrial genesis to its Internet descendants in a historically based retail strategy class that investigates the determinants of new retail formats (major retail innovations – MRIs) over a > 200 year span. MRIs entail a major reconfiguration of the retail mix (i.e. price, product, place, promotion and personnel) , take significant business from existing formats that sell the same goods, generate greater benefits to customers than do rival formats and are widely imitated.

The author chronologically presents how the industrial revolution generated major environmental changes that facilitated a creative and highly effective re-organization of the retail mix.

Changes in environmental factors (e.g. mass production, transportation, location of population and communication) made possible retail formats that could not have existed earlier.

The course is based on two theories that are linked by the retail mix; one theory relates to consumer store choice, while the other relates to the minimum market size required for a retail format to be viable. To illustrate, more personnel raises service, drawing customers from rivals while raising costs; higher costs raise the needed market size.

All six MRIs are derived from the two aforementioned theories. Experience indicates these theories are valid for assessing retailing at all stages of economic development. The course is based on the authors own material.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

For the past several decades women have been moving into the United States workforce in greater numbers and they have been gaining access to the types of jobs that were, traditionally, performed exclusively by men. Despite this progress, they are still having difficulty penetrating the so‐called “glass ceiling” into upper management positions (Alimo‐Metcalfe 1993; Tavakolian 1993). Many reasons have been advanced, but the most compelling of these concerns the “glass walls” that support the “glass ceiling”. The “glass walls” refer to those invisible barriers that limit the ability of women and minorities to gain access to the type of job that would place them in a position to break through the “glass ceiling” (Townsend 1996). If women are to gain parity with men in the workforce, they need to succeed in the positions that lie inside the “glass walls” that will enable them to rise through the “glass ceiling” to upper management.

This study develops the idea of smart retailing, exemplified in innovative, technology-enriched retail services as part of service-oriented strategies. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to provide a new integrated framework to understand the emerging retail scenario based on the smart usage of technologies to improve retail service and develop innovation management strategies. This framework will provide a comprehensive understanding the basic forms of smart retailing as the current competitive scenario.

As a viewpoint, this paper employs an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon the actual challenges in retailing, to propose a new perspective, the smart retailing one, to describe the new competitive scenario and formulates an emerging research agenda.

The present paper contributes to research on innovation and technology management for retailing by examining the key dimensions of smart retailing, which aims to enhancing retail service quality and retailers’ performance.

The paper clearly explains how current retailing is moving to a smart perspective, and how retail management should be adapted to successfully perform in the current service-dominant logic scenario, as consequence of the increasing consumer involvement in service co-production and the rapid growth of digital technologies.