Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1991.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references ([leaf 132-133]).

The problem with which this dissertation is concerned is that of determining the true role performed by the chain supermarket store managers. A comparative study is made of chain supermarket store managers, supermarket chain-level managers, and non-food chain retail store managers and their ranking and rating of the importance of fifteen work functions ordinarily performed by retail store managers. The hypotheses of the study state that there will be a statistically significant difference in the rankings and ratings of the importance of the work functions in each of the six paired comparisons between respondent groups. In comparing chain supermarket store managers to non-food chain retail store managers, there is a statistically significant difference in their ranking of the following work functions: (1) overseeing all forms of security and enforcing store rules, company policies, laws, and other regulations; (2) handling employee disputes and discipline and assuring proper appearance and dress; (3) directing merchandising-- space allocation and display--out-of-stock, pricing, stock rotation, etc.; (4) developing good community relations by participating in civic affairs, cooperating with charities, taking part in local business activities, etc.; and (5) scheduling number of hours and employees needed. When supermarket chain-level managers are compared with nonfood chain retail store managers, there is a statistically significant difference in the ranking of the following seven work functions: (1) interviewing, hiring, and discharging of employees; (2) handling employee disputes and discipline and insuring proper appearance and dress of employees; (3) directing merchandising--space allocation and display-- out-of-stock, pricing, stock rotation, etc.; (4) developing 3 good community relations by participating in civic affairs, cooperating with charities, taking part in local business activities, etc.; (5) scheduling number of hours and employees needed; (6) delegating responsibility and authority to subordinates by allowing them to make decisions within their assigned area of responsibility; and (7) maintaining company identification in the store by following through on company-wide programs and demonstrating and directing loyalty to the company.

Master of Science / Department of Agricultural Economics / Hikaru Hanawa Peterson / The purpose of this study was to examine the economic contribution of rural grocery stores to the communities they serve. In addition, this study looked at the community characteristics that influence the level of economic contribution of a rural grocery store. The analysis was conducted for 163 Kansas rural grocery stores that were selected from cities with populations of fewer than 2,500 people. Regarding the first objective, household income changes and loss of business activity associated with each grocery store were estimated using the IMPLAN economic modeling system. To do so, changes in employment at each grocery store and household income in the community were measured assuming the loss of income that affected households in a city would face if they had to travel a greater distance to buy groceries. The economic contribution of rural grocery stores in Kansas averaged $644,413, ranging from $38,441 and $3,921,027. The results showed that population and location within the state had direct effects on the economic impact of a grocery store. With more complex economies in the eastern and south central parts of Kansas, these stores had a greater economic contribution than stores in the Southwest and Northwest. Communities in the western parts of Kansas would be the worst off from losing their grocery store because of increased travel costs they would incur by traveling the next alternative store. For the second objective, city and county characteristics that were thought to influence the level of the economic contribution of a store were tested. Two regression models were considered specifying the natural log of the economic contribution of the grocery store and the percentage of total value added the grocery store contributed to the county economy as the respective dependent variables. It was observed that population was one of the biggest drivers of the economic contribution of a grocery store. Other variables that were statistically significant in both models were the number of city households that had children, relative remoteness of the county, the number of convenience stores per 1,000 people, and the county wealth. In conclusion, this study showed that grocery stores have a significant impact on the communities that they serve. Both employment and travel costs had direct implications on the economic impact of a store. Additionally, demographic factors and other community characteristics influenced the level of impact that these grocery stores can have on their communities.

Background: The retail sector is rapidly developing over the past years. Retailers are investing more efforts and resources to provide a seamless experience through multiple channels. These developments led to significant changes in customer behaviour. Customers buying activities and way of selecting the products and retailers faced different changes and developments. The online retailing sector is entitled to continuous development. The latest development was due to the Covid-19 global pandemic that came without any previous notice. The customer behaviour starts adopting the digital online channels in most of their needs and wants. The appearance of new customer behaviour patterns due to Covid-19 lead to the emergence of new customer behaviour.Purpose: This study is of an exploratory and constructive nature. It is concerned with deepening the knowledge about the change in customer buying behaviour brought by Covid-19 on the retailing sector. The aim of the study is to identify and test new behavioural patterns that would influence the Swedish millennials’ in selecting between online and offline stores for shopping and buying fashion products.Method: An abductive approach was followed in this paper. Mixed methods of both qualitative and quantitative were used to fulfil the purpose of this exploratory research. The research followed a sequential exploratory design of two data collection phases. Theiiempirical data was conducted from (4) focus groups sessions with a total number of (20) interviewee, and (94) relevant responses from a web-based survey.Conclusion: The study has revealed two significant findings and contributed to propose a conceptual model. The fruitful results of this study are: (1) there is a vast customers’ migration towards online stores. (2) there are new behavioural patterns related to Covid-19 that are influencing the customer buying behaviour. (3) A proposed conceptual model which is concerned with the factors influencing the customer buying behaviour in selecting between online and offline fashion stores.

Since 1997, the retail industry of South Korea has suffered a decline in sales due to the nation's financial crisis. Because of the increase of price consciousness, discount stores have become the stores most attractive to South Korean consumers. The purpose of this study was to (a) compare the differences between South Korean and the U.S. consumers in demographics, shopping orientation, perception of the importance of store and product attributes, and store evaluation, satisfaction and patronage in discount stores and (b) examine the relationships among the six variables. In addition, South Korean consumers' preferences toward the strategies used in the U.S. discount stores were examined to determine whether these strategies could be adapted to South Korean discount stores. The proposed model suggests that consumers' shopping orientation affects their perception of the importance of store and product attributes. Consumers' perception of the importance of attributes affects how they evaluate a store. Consumers' evaluation of the store then influences their satisfaction with the store. If consumers are satisfied with the store, they choose to patronize the store. A total of 234 participants recruited at Wal-Mart were included in this study, 117 from South Korea and 117 from the U.S. Results showed that there were significant differences between the two countries in participants' occupation, marital status, age, education, the perception of the importance of attributes in discount stores, and store evaluation and satisfaction. When the relationships between variables were examined, results showed that the proposed model is partially supported. When South Korean participants' preferences toward the strategies used in the U.S. were examined, they showed high preferences toward some strategies. The implication of the results were discussed. / Master of Science

The "clicks and bricks" strategy, combining online and offline shopping, is crucial in today's retail environment to meet customer demands. This approach enhances consumer engagement and satisfaction by blending the practical advantages of physical stores with the convenience of online shopping. However, there are challenges to overcome when implementing clicks and bricks, including technological integration, reliable inventory control, and consistent service quality. This study focuses on exploring the impact of this strategy on consumer value co-creation, emphasizing engagement, satisfaction, and the factors that contribute to successful implementation.

The problem with which this paper is concerned is to observe and appraise the retail advertising and promotional procedure of five of the Dallas department stores. After observing their advertising methods, an attempt will be made to conclude whether their efficiency might be increased through use of different advertising and promotional policies.

The growing disparity in data storage and retrieval needs of modern applications is driving the proliferation of a wide variety of storage systems (e.g., key-value stores, cloud storage services, distributed filesystems, and flash cache, etc.). While extant storage systems are designed and tuned for a specific set of applications targeting a range of workload characteristics, they lack the flexibility in adapting to the ever-changing workload behaviors. Moreover, the complexities in implementing modern storage systems and adapting ever-changing storage requirements present unique opportunities and engineering challenges. In this dissertation, we design and develop a series of novel data management and storage systems solutions by applying a simple yet effective rule---workload awareness. We find that simple workload-aware data management strategies are effective in improving the efficiency of modern storage systems, sometimes by an order of magnitude. The first two works tackle the data management and storage space allocation issues at distributed and cloud storage level, while the third work focuses on low-level data management problems in the local storage system, which many high-level storage/data-intensive applications rely on. In the first part of this dissertation (Chapter 3), we propose and develop MBal, a high-performance in-memory object caching framework with adaptive multi-phase load balancing, which supports not only horizontal (scale-out) but vertical (scale-up) scalability as well. MBal is able to make efficient use of available resources in the cloud through its fine-grained, partitioned, lockless design. In the second part of this dissertation (Chapter 4 and Chapter5), we design and build CAST (Chapter 4), a Cloud Analytics Storage Tiering solution that cloud tenants can use to reduce monetary cost and improve performance of analytics workloads. The approach takes the first step towards providing storage tiering support for data analytics in the cloud. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid cloud object storage system (Chapter 5) that could effectively engage both the cloud service providers and cloud tenants via a novel dynamic pricing mechanism. In the third part of this dissertation (Chapter 6), targeting local storage, we explore offline algorithms for flash caching in terms of both hit ratio and flash lifespan. We design and implement a multi-stage heuristic by synthesizing several techniques that manage data at the granularity of a flash erasure unit (which we call a container) to approximate the offline optimal algorithm. In the fourth part of this dissertation (Chapter 7), we are focused on how to enable fast prototyping of efficient distributed key-value stores targeting a proxy-based layered architecture. In this work, we design and build {con}, a framework that significantly reduce the engineering effort required to build a full-fledged distributed key-value store. Our dissertation shows that simple workload-aware data management strategies can bring huge benefit in terms of both efficiency (i.e., performance, monetary cost, etc.) and flexibility (i.e., ease-of-use, ease-of-deployment, programmability, etc.). The principles of leveraging workload dynamicity and storage heterogeneity can be used to guide next-generation storage system software design, especially when being faced with new storage hardware technologies. / Ph. D. / Modern storage systems often manage data without considering the dynamicity of user behaviors. This design approach does not consider the unique features of underlying storage medium either. To this end, this dissertation first studies how the combinational factors of random user workload dynamicity and inherent storage hardware heterogeneity impact the data management efficiency. This dissertation then presents a series of practical and efficient techniques, algorithms, and optimizations to make the storage systems workload-aware. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our workload-aware design choices and strategies.

The department store retailing concept grew out of the nineteenth century dry goods retail trade. Dry goods stores were usually housed in a group of nineteenth century commercial buildings. As the United States became more prosperous during the late nineteenth century, dry goods establishments outgrew their buildings and developed a new department store building type. The "second generation" store design was generally tripartite: large ground floor display windows, intermediate stories with regular banks of windows, and decorative upper one or two stories capped with an elaborate cornice. These flagship buildings were expanded and remodeled until the 1950s, when the focus of department store retailing shifted to the suburban branch stores. The branch stores anchored shopping centers in the 1950s and 1960s and enclosed shopping malls thereafter. / Department of Architecture