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Department stores invest in loyalty strategies that largely focus on retaining current high value customers in response to increasing competition in retail shopping. In this study, we examine the contribution of the top 20% customers for transaction frequency and value ("heavy buyers") to the total sales, and the consistency of this contribution across departments within a store. We also investigate the heavy buyer stability over time across 3 years, from over 550 million transactions from a department store chain in East Asia. The results show that the Pareto ratio of the top 20% spenders account for 71% of revenue (and 52% of the total transactions), and the top 20% transactors represent 58% of revenue (and 62% of total transactions), which may signal the role of such heavy buyers to overall stores sales. At each department level, the heavy buyers (by value) contribute from 65% to 86% of the department revenue. Despite this, the stability of the top 20% segment over time varies greatly by department from 11% to 74%. Finally, whether high value customers in one department store also translate across departments, depends mainly on the department size in terms of its shopper penetration. The research furthers our knowledge on Pareto Law, with important implications for customer retention strategies and loyalty programs especially for retailers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hypermarket is a combined supermarket and department store that carries a large range of products. Since the opening of the first hypermarket in the US in the early 1930s, this concept has spread globally. Nowhere is this trend more visible than in India, now the world's most populous country with a middle class that will expectedly grow to 800 million in 2030. This paper coins the theory of hypermarketization to explain why and how the hypermarket as a globalized form signifies the full integration of liberalization, retail and middle-class consumer culture in emerging markets. The argument that hypermarketization marks the point when successful economies in the Global South mature and then qualify as emerging markets is based on empirical material from fieldwork on vegetarianism and meat in hypermarkets and among middle-class groups in South India, namely participant observation and interviewing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Korea has faced many social issues due to long working hours, lack of rest areas, and poor rest facility environments for cleaners, security guards, department store workers, etc. Discussions have been ongoing about mandating the installation of rest facilities. From August 18, 2022, Article 128–2 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, concerning the installation of rest facilities, was enforced. Consequently, employers in all industries are required to install rest facilities, and laws have been established to ensure these facilities meet certain standards. Accordingly, this study investigated the current status of rest facility installations and the awareness of the law's enactment in Korean industrial sites. The results, analyzed by gender, age, managerial status, industry, and size of the business, indicated that younger people were less satisfied with the rest facilities. Managers were more knowledgeable about the legal regulations than workers. In the service industry, compared to other industries, smaller businesses were less likely to have rest facilities and were less aware of the legal regulations. The results of this study are expected to be used as basic data to help establish the rest facility installation laws in Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the promotion of Twentieth Century–Fox's production of The Robe (1953)—which exhibited Dean Cornwell's oil paintings in local department stores in Detroit—in relation to the city's sociocultural context and racial tensions. It argues that ongoing issues in the city such as property ownership, racialized topographical boundaries, and class aspiration can be traced across Detroit's film culture in the postwar period, particularly in the burgeoning middlebrow culture of materialistic consumption. The promotional campaign's use of art exhibitions in department stores represented a significant moment for new ideas about class, culture, and racial identity in the city, contributing to the formation of the white suburban middle class and functioning as an example of racialized tastemaking. Accounts of this postwar cultural shift, particularly as it pertained to film culture, have underemphasized the importance of racial identity and exclusion to such formations. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates film history, material culture studies, and cultural history, this essay uses the Cornwell exhibition as a case study for understanding the impact of racial tensions on class identity in 1950s Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1930s, Hollywood enticed women to purchase film costume replicas and product tieins in their local department stores via a cooperative marketing campaign. Hollywood replication gowns were inexpensive, available to consumers of modest means, and offered a way to explore the glamour of stardom through dress. They were available in a variety of styles, but the Letty Lynton dress was the most famous of its genre, and its success solidified the wide-shouldered look of the 1930s. The prevalence of similarly designed gowns establishes it as a cultural sub-meme of Hollywood replications. One example, housed in the Alameda Historical Museum (AHM), was analyzed using the material culture methodology of E. M. Fleming. The study presents a case in which women of this era experimented with the percolating sense of self-determination through Hollywood dress replications, unique to how women express that today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There existed a fascinating means of collecting fairy tales in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has hitherto remained unexplored: the collection of chromolithographs or "chromos," used as a marketing tool by French department stores like Le Bon Marché and by chocolate producers like Poulain. Scholars such as Emily Cormack, Laura Kalba, and Pearl Michel have carried out essential research on the deployment of chromos in the rise of consumer society, but this is the first study with a specific focus on chromos that feature fairy tales. In mid-century, Victor-Auguste Poulain, a French chocolatier from Blois, found the means to mass produce chocolate and sought to transform the nineteenth-century conception of chocolate from being an elite privilege or a medicinal product to being a plearurable food accessible to the middle classes. It was under the direction of Victor-Auguste's son Albert that chromos, including fairy-tale themed chromos, became an important marketing tool for the company in the 1880s. Children in particular were encouraged to purchase the mass-produced chocolate by the insertion into the packaging of fragments of tales like "The White Cat," "The Doe in the Woods," and "Beauty with the Golden Hair." Each chocolate bar would include a beautiful color chromo of the tale on the recto, with the narrative fragment on the verso. This marketing strategy becomes a desire-generating machine: the desire for more story fuels the desire to purchase more chocolate, which subsequently fuels the desire for more story. In effect, as I hope to show through this case study of Poulain's use of tales by d'Aulnoy, narrative desire gets converted into consumer desire through Poulain's marketing campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: While today's customer steadily adapts to various modes of shopping, their beliefs around fluency through each shopping channel, and personal factors such as income level, can impact their intention to patronage or purchase from omnichannel department stores. Hence, this study analysed the customers of omnichannel fashion department stores, using perceived fluency and income as indirect factors that help understand customers' patronage intention and purchase intention. Design/methodology/approach: The overarching framework for this research is the theory of reasoned action, in which patronage and purchase intentions represent the specific likelihood-of-performance behaviours. A Seemingly Unrelated Regression model was empirically used to analyse the relationships between generational cohorts, income, and perceived channel fluency and the behaviours that lead to patronage intention and purchase intention. Researchers conducted a survey among 552 omnichannel fashion department store consumers to examine today's retail environment. Findings: The results of this study suggest that (1) consumers between the ages of 50 and 69 years, including older Generation X and younger Baby Boomers, who earn between $60,000 and $79,999 in annual salary show a significantly positive relationship with both patronage and purchase intentions through perceived fluency and (2) consumers between the ages of 38 and 49 years, including older Millennials and younger Generation X, who earn between $80,000 and $99,999 in annual salary show a significantly positive relationship with purchase intention through perceived fluency Originality/value: This study analyses correlations between a generational cohort, perceived fluency as moderated by income and the relationship between these variables and customers' patronage and purchase intentions, which has not been studied before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The primary objective of this article is to examine current procurement, inventory control and management practices in modern healthcare, with a particular focus on the procurement and management of surgical supplies in a prominent public, highly specialized healthcare sector. Design/methodology/approach: This study was conducted in three phases. In Phase 1, the study team interacted with various hospital management stakeholders, including the surgical hospital store, examined the current procurement process and identified challenges. Phase 2 focused on selecting items for a detailed study and collected the qualitative and quantitative details of the store department of the healthcare sector chosen. A detailed study analyzed revenue, output/demand, inventory levels, etc. In Phase 3, a decision-making framework is proposed, and inventory control systems are redesigned and demonstrated for the selected items. Findings: It was observed that the demand for many surgical items had increased significantly over the years due to an increase in disposable/disposable items, while inventories fluctuated widely. Maximum inventory levels varied between 50 and 75%. Storage and availability were important issues for the hospital. It is assumed the hospital adopts the proposed inventory control system. In this case, the benefits can be a saving of 62% of the maximum inventory, 20% of the average stock in the system and optimal use of storage space, improving the performance and productivity of the hospital. Research limitations/implications: This study can help the healthcare sector administration to develop better systems for the procurement and delivery of common surgical items and efficient resource allocation. It can help provide adequate training to store staff. This study can help improve management/procurement policies, ordering and delivery systems, better service levels, and inventory control of items in the hospital business context. This study can serve as a pilot study to further investigate the overall hospital operations. Practical implications: This study can help the healthcare sector administration develop better systems for procuring and delivering common surgical items and efficient resource allocation. It can help provide adequate training to store staff. This study can help improve management/procurement policies, ordering and delivery systems, better service levels and inventory control of items in the hospital business context. This study can serve as a pilot study to further investigate the overall hospital operations. Originality/value: This study is an early attempt to develop a decision framework and inventory control system from the perspective of healthcare inventory management. The gaps identified in real hospital scenarios are investigated, and theoretically based-inventory management strategies are applied and proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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