Shopping is a daily necessary activity to most of the people in Hong Kong. From the old days when people went shopping in the bazaars to the recent days when most people go shopping in shopping centres, the dominant mode of shopping changed. The effects brought by different kinds of shopping facilities to people are worth studying. It is not difficult to observe the trend that old retail developments in old districts are mainly shopping streets while new retail developments in new towns are mainly shopping centres. Some voices from the public are pushing the retaining of old street shops and old street cultures despite the property developers tend to build shopping centres in their new projects. The benefits from shopping streets and shopping centres to shoppers and developers have been studied in this dissertation by empirical and conceptual background study, survey to shoppers and shop operators and information provided by property agents and employees of private developers. From socialization point of view, the comprehensive tenant mix and comfortable shopping environment in shopping centres attract shoppers to stay longer in shopping centres than in shopping streets which increase the chance of interaction among shoppers thus improve their level of social lives. However, the stability of shops and shop operators in shops at shopping streets is beneficial to building up community strength within the neighbourhood. The relationships among shoppers and shop operators and among shop operators in shopping streets are stronger than that in shopping centres. For the benefits other than socialization aspect, shops in shopping streets provide cheaper goods due to the relatively lower rents and lower overhead costs in shopping streets while shopping centres provide better accessibility and better facilities due to their better management. For the benefits to developers, developing shopping centres is beneficial to them in the ways of increasing their rental income when leasing retail premises and boosting the selling prices of residential properties where shopping centre is a bundle of the development. In some of the projects of official organizations, such as Urban Renewal Authority, we can see that benefits from these two shopping facilities can be merged together. For example, the design of shopping streets and the buildings around and setting up greenery areas along shopping streets can improve the air-conditioning problem and improve the attractiveness of staying to shoppers. Private developers also introduced old shops to their shopping centres. Product prices of old shops remain the same in shopping centre as in shopping streets. However, the relationship among shoppers and shop operators cannot be copied easily even if the old shop signs are the same. Time is needed for building the strength within a community. / published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

To survive and thrive in the customer-oriented global market, retail companies have to make persistent efforts to provide customers with satisfactory shopping experience enriched by leisure process, interaction for merchandise information and personalised assistance. In traditional retail stores, customers’ needs cannot be fully satisfied due to difficulties in locating target products, out-of-stocks, a lack of professional assistance for product selection, and long waiting for payments. The relative visibility and traceability of individual items provided by the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is helpful for enhancement of customer shopping experience (CSE). However, current RFID applications for retail business tend to be limited to inventory control and replenishment, with few implementations for CSE enhancement based on collection and analysis of real-time RFID data. To mitigate these limitations, this research project develops RFID applications for real-time collection and analysis of customer shopping behaviour (CSB) data in retail stores. Artificial intelligence (AI) is incorporated for data analysis to facilitate business decision-making and proactive individual marketing. Accordingly, an item-level RFID-based customer shopping experience enhancement (IRCSEE) system is developed to provide customers with leisure shopping process, interaction for merchandise information and personalised guidance for enhancement of CSE in apparel retail stores. The IRCSEE system incorporates RFID hardware devices installed in an apparel retail store to interrogate RFID-tagged apparel items to obtain data for subsequent sales processing and analysis. It is characterised with a programmable data format for unique identification of individual apparel items, together with a suite of software modules to control the RFID hardware devices at different locations of the apparel retail store for real-time collection of product information and CSB data. Moreover, an innovative fuzzy screening (FS) algorithm of AI techniques is developed to analyse the RFID-collected CSB data and the corresponding product information for generation of apparel collocation recommendations to provide customers with intelligent and personalised assistances in product selection. The algorithm considers not only the static fashion expertise, but also the dynamic customer preferences for collocation, such that the recommendations are more effective and adaptive for enhancement of CSE in the fast-changing apparel retail industry. The IRCSEE system is validated in an emulated RFID-based apparel retail store. Experimental results demonstrate that with appropriate RFID hardware settings, the proposed system is effective to help enhance CSE in apparel retail stores by providing customers with leisure shopping process, interaction for merchandise information and personalised apparel collocations. Furthermore, the approaches for collecting real-time CSB by RFID technology and analysing such data by AI techniques can be conveniently adapted for many other products to improve retail business management in general. / published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

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