Introduction

Most textbooks treat the retail sector based on the question: what is retailing? Although this question is certainly also discussed in this book, the focus lies on answering the question: how do I do retailing? After all, entrants to the industry will only rarely find themselves in a situation where they are directly involved in the creation of entirely new retail formulas. They are more likely to work in existing companies, where the formulation of the problem is focused more on improvement and optimisation of the existing operations, both in terms of the market approach and in terms of internal procedure. This is why this book pays much more attention to operational applications of the theory.