Reading Retail: A Geographical Perspective on Retailing and Consumption Spaces PDF
Preview Reading Retail: A Geographical Perspective on Retailing and Consumption Spaces
Reading Retail This page intentionally lelt blank Reading Retail A geographical perspective on retailing and consumption spaces Neil Wrigley Professor of Geography University of Southampton Michelle Lowe Senior Lecturer in Geography University of Southampton First edition published 1998 by Hodder Arnold Co-published in the USA by Oxford University Press Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2002 Neil Wrigley and Michelle Lowe All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the authors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-340-70661-9 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-340-70660-2 (pbk) Typeset by Phoenix Photosetting, Chatham, Kent Für Amelia and Theüdore This page intentionally lelt blank Contents Preface xiii Acknowledgements xv PART I Introduction 1. 1. Reading retail: purpose and organization of the book 3 Developing a sense of the debate: reading and re-reading retail 4 Example 1: The empire filters back: Starbucks coffee 4 Reading 1.1 - 'Styling' and 'placing' Starbucks 5 Example 2: Questioning the globalization of Coca-Cola 6 Reading 1.2 - Restructuring the cola market 7 Reading 1.3 - Contextualizing Coca-Cola 8 Example 3: From pornography to postmodern road map 9 Reading 1.4 - Re-reading Zola: signpost towards a 'new retail geography' 10 Constructions of retail geography: placing the book and its organization 11 Reading 1.5 - Defining and questioning 'retail geography', 1994 12 Organization of the book and the wider agenda 14 PART 2 Setting the scene: retail dynamics 19 2 Reconfiguration of corporate structures in retailing 21 Concentration of capital and the rise of the retail corporation 21 Reading 2.1 - Recalling the 1980s - Britain's 'retail revolution' 24 Concentration and the retail corporation in the 1990s 25 Example 1: The road to oligopoly - US drug store retailing 25 Example 2: What became of the great American department stores? 27 Reading 2.2 - Campeau and the bankruptcy of Federated 29 Example 3: Store wars and after - UK food retailing 31 Reading 2.3 - The vulnerabilities of market dominance 33 viii Contents Example 4: LBOs and deleveraging - US food retailing 37 Reading 2.4 - How financial re-engineering held back consolidation 38 Some conceptual themes 41 Corporate lock-in, sunk costs and market exit 41 Reading 2.5 - Grounding retail capital and managing sunk costs 42 Reading 2.6 - Sunk costs and exit: Littlewoods and British Shoe Corporation 45 Capital structure decisions and corporate reconfiguration 46 Corporate strategists and their governance 48 Reading 2.7 -Antonini's removal from Kmart 49 3 Reconfiguration of retailer-supply chain interfaces 51 The changing character of retailer-supplier relations 51 Shifts in the bargaining power of retailers and suppliers 52 Reshaping the nature of supply relations 54 Reading 3.1 - Relational contracting: the case of bread 55 Reading 3.2 - Dominance, dependency and preferred suppliers: dothing retailing 58 The strategie significance of retailer own-label products 61 Reading 3.3 - Building own-label supply relations 63 'The ties that bind' - the embeddedness of supply relations 65 Reading 3.4 - Social relations and the organization of own-label supply chains 66 Commodity chains and retail-supplier relations 67 Reading 3.5 - Conceptualizing the commodity chain 68 4 Organizational and technological transformations in retail distribution 71 The expanding scale of retail formats - supermarkets, superstores and supercentres 71 The emergence of the supermarket 72 Reading 4.1 - Big Bear crashes into New Jersey 73 Reading 4.2 - A&P and the challenge of the supermarket 74 Superstores and supercentres 76 The revolution in distribution and systems 83 Seizing control of the supply chain: the logistical transformation of UK food retailing 84 Reading 4.3 - Three stages of evolution in UK retaillogistics 87 Reading 4.4 - Delivering quality: Tesco's logistics system by the early 1990s 88 The UK system in international perspective: contrasts with the USA 89 The emergence and logistical implications of electronic non-store retailing 92 Contents ix 5 Changing retail employment relations 96 The consequences of labour intensity 96 Characteristics of retail employment - feminization and part-time working 99 Reading 5.1 - Regulation and employment in 1990s UK retailing 101 Conceptualizing retail employment 102 A primary / secondary labour market? 103 A multiply segmented and shifting retaillabour market 105 Reading 5.2 - Taylorism for retailers? 106 Consumption work and consumption workplaces 107 Reading 5.3 - The shopgirl: dass, gender and selling 108 Reading 5.4 - The Gap, Inc. - a case study in customer care 109 Reading 5.5 - The culture of the customer in retailing 111 6 Retail regulation and governance I 12 Spatial scales of retail regulation and market consequences 113 Retail regulation at the local scale - contradictions and tensions 113 Reading 6.1 - Contradictions of enforcing the Shops Act at the locallevel 114 Reading 6.2 - Implementing competition regulation at the local scale in US retailing 116 Reading 6.3 - Contested regulatory domains: the local! national interface 118 Retail regulation at the national scale - market mIes and spatial outcomes 119 Private-interest versus public-interest regulation in retailing 121 Reading 6.4 - Private-interest regulation and the shaping of competitive space 123 'Real' regulation, retailing and the nature of the regulatory state 124 Corporate governance - the internal regulation of the retail firm 125 PART 3 Making and re-making the geographies of retail capital 129 7 The inconstant geography and spatial switching of retail capital I : urban issues I 3 I The creatively destructive nature of the spatial switching of retail capital 132 Reading 7.1 - Stores the road passes through: the drive-in market and the Los Angeles supermarket in the early 1930s 135
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