Large-Scale Retailers

Large-scale retailers operate on a scale of capital, stock, staff, and turnover far beyond a typical small fixed-shop retailer, and are generally organised as substantial businesses in their own right rather than as a single individual's shop.

Departmental Stores are a single large store that sells a very wide variety of goods — clothing, groceries, household goods, electronics, and much else — organised internally into separate departments, each handling one category, but all housed under one roof and one overall management. A customer can, in principle, satisfy almost every kind of shopping need in one visit to one building.

Chain Stores (Multiple Shops) are a number of standardised, near-identical retail outlets, located in different towns or different parts of the same city, all owned and centrally controlled by a single firm. Each individual outlet may be no larger than an ordinary shop, but because there are many of them operating under common ownership, buying, and policy, the firm as a whole enjoys the buying power and management advantages of a large business.

Mail-Order Business sells to customers who never visit a physical shop at all: the customer places an order and makes payment by post (or, in a modern equivalent, by phone or online) after seeing a catalogue or advertisement, and the goods are then delivered by post or courier. There is no face-to-face contact between seller and buyer at any stage of the sale.

Consumer Co-operative Stores are retail stores owned and run by the consumers themselves, organised on co-operative principles, for their own mutual benefit rather than to earn a profit for outside owners. Members typically share in the store's surplus and have a say in how it is run.

Supermarkets are large, self-service stores, typically selling a wide range of food and everyday household items, where customers pick goods off open shelves themselves and pay together at a checkout point, rather than being served item by item by a shop assistant. Their large scale of buying and self-service format usually let them offer goods at comparatively lower prices and margins than a small shop can. …