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楼主看一下 大小商铺原文是这个吗n recent decades, retailers have sounded a consistent theme: “Bigger is better.” Superstores and category killers have proliferated, elbowing out the small mom-and-pop stores that were once retailing’s mainstays. Today, the average grocery store is more than 50% larger than it was in the 1980s. And the average Wal-Mart is more than 30% larger.
Suddenly, though, the pendulum seems to be swinging back. In the past year, many of the largest U.S. retailers, including Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Service Merchandise, Sears, and OfficeMax, have begun experimenting with small-store formats. Rather than operating the small stores as individual outlets, though, the companies are managing all the stores in an area as a closely knit network.
Dollar General, a Wal-Mart competitor, exemplifies the network strategy. It matches Wal-Mart’s prices but competes against the average 92,000-square-foot Wal-Mart with a swarm of conveniently located, 6,000-square-foot stores. The company, which has 4,200 stores from Pennsylvania to Texas, is highly profitable and growing fast. Six hundred new stores are opening every year. Its success has even spawned a copycat competitor, Family Dollar, with more than 3,000 stores of its own.
Less Is More
Small stores have always offered some important advantages. By distributing small outlets throughout an area, a retailer can guarantee that one of them will almost always be closer to a given shopper than a behemoth store at the edge of town. In addition, small stores make it easier for customers to get from their cars to the stores, and, once inside, to find the products they’re looking for. Until recently, though, those advantages were overwhelmed by the two key advantages held by big stores: broader product selection and lower operating costs. Now, retailers are finding that tightly linked networks of small stores can enjoy the same scale advantages.
A network of small mom-and-pop stores can actually enjoy the same scale advantages as those of superstores.
When it comes to product selection, for example, retailers are finding that what customers really value is a broad choice of product categories, not an endless array of products within a category. In fact, research indicates many big retailers are now being penalized for carrying too many different brands of the same product. A study done in the early 1990s by Kurt Salmon Associates found that more than half of the dry-goods items in grocery stores sell less than one unit per week, and studies by the Food Marketing Institute indicate that most grocers have too much variety: once a threshold of variety is reached, total category sales barely budge by including more. By offering many categories but just one or two |
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