The Centre-Periphery Dialectics in Eastern Sicily Retail System. An Exploratory Research

This paper aims at scrutinizing from an historical perspective the deep transformations shaped by retail spaces and new consumption patterns challenging long-entrenched dichotomies, such as the centre-periphery one. In particular, the exploratory research explores the territorial reconfiguration of the main Eastern Sicily metropolitan areas, Catania and Messina, from the lens of the retail geography, namely after the diffusion of new suburban retail formats which have completely upset deeply-rooted relations between urban core and suburban rings.

Buy online collect in-store: exploring grocery click&collect using a national case study

Purpose Twenty-first century online retailing has reshaped the retail landscape. Grocery shopping is emerging as the next fastest growing category in online retailing in the UK, having implications for the channels we use to purchase goods. Using Sainsbury’s data, the authors create a bespoke set of grocery click&collect catchments. The resultant catchments allow an investigation of performance within the emerging channel of grocery click&collect. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The spatial interaction method of “Huff gravity modeling” is applied in a semi-automated approach, used to calculate grocery click&collect catchments for 95 Sainsbury’s stores in England. The catchments allow investigation of the spatial variation and particularly rural-urban differences. Store and catchment characteristics are extracted and explored using ordinary least squares regression applied to investigate “demand per day” (a confidentiality transformed revenue value) as a function of competition, performance and geodemographic factors. Findings The findings show that rural stores exhibit a larger catchment extent for grocery click&collect when compared with urban stores. Linear regression finds store characteristics as having the greatest impact on demand per day, adhering to wider retail competition literature. Conclusions display a need for further investigation (e.g. quantifying loyalty). Originality/value New insights are contributed at a national level for grocery click&collect, as well as e-commerce, multichannel shopping and retail geography. Areas for further investigation are identified, particularly quantitatively capturing brand loyalty. The research has commercial impact as the catchments are being applied by Sainsbury’s to decide the next 100 stores and plan for the next five years of their grocery click&collect offering.

Geography of brewery: development of spatial distribution of Czech beer market after 1989

Much of the current research in economic geography focuses on spatial distribution of industries and their market competition. As the data about localization are relatively easily accessible, empirical studies are often conducted. However, our knowledge of retail distribution strategies is still incomplete. By examining 54 Czech breweries and their distribution regions, this article aims to fill the knowledge gap relating to retail distribution strategies in the brewing industry. Based on the Bennison typology of retail location strategies, which is used within the field of retail development, we identified four factors determining the decision on the future retail strategy of a specific brewery: geographic location, competitiveness, affiliation to a business group, and beer taste. As a result, the Czech beer market constitutes not only an attractive topic, but also an exceptional case for the study of economic actors’ spatial behaviour. The article tries to contribute to the social and scientific knowledge by adding a topic located on the borders of economic geography and retail geography which has not yet been studied in this way.

Promoting Retail Innovation: Knowledge Flows during the Emergence of Self-Service and Supermarket Retailing in Britain

The notion of innovation underpins many studies of change within the literatures of retail management and the new retail geography. However, conceptualisation of the innovation process within retailing has remained surprisingly partial, with insufficient attention being given to the processes of knowledge management and learning within the firm. The authors illustrate the importance of such themes by reference to the key organisational and technological changes surrounding the development of self-service and supermarket retailing in Britain during the postwar years 1945–65. A conceptual framework derived from a reading of the business-management and economic geography literatures is employed to analyse the innovation transfer and related knowledge-management processes that influenced retail change during this critical period.