Brand loyalty is not dead, brand loyalty is all about the customers’ emotions and

feelings towards the brand. Brand loyalty is pretty diversified nowadays. Customers are
driven by their feelings and emotions. These are the elements that force them to gabck
to their previous brand company. Concept stores are the future of brick and mortar
stores, online presence has become vital. Brick and mortar stores are being replaced
by online stores and concept stores. Customers are more paying attention to the design
of the stores, employees’ attitudes, and brands. Concept stores are really small shops
that may have limited stock of brand. These type of store are based on the experience
of the customers has while buying the product or service. The Palais Royal was one of
the most important marketplaces in Europe, the oldest and most important
marketplaces in Europe. The paper bags were invented by a woman, in 1870,
Margaret Knight designed a machine to cut, fold and paste paper bag bottoms. This
meant that she could produce flat/square-bottomed paper bags, a great improvement
on the earlier envelope-style bag design. Retail industry is worth $33.5 trillion,
Retailers make money by raising prices well above their cost of labor, equipment,
and distribution. Everyone along the supply chain does the same thing. Some large
retailers often manufacture best-selling items themselves. This is called vertical
integration.This price increase is known as a markup or the retailer's profit margin. It's
typically 100% (double the cost) at each stage. That's called "keystone markup." It's
needed to cover costs and provide enough profit to pay stockholders or private owners.
Fraud from employees, customers and suppliers is still a problem, internal fraud
usually involves gaps in a company’s internal controls and culture. An effective set of
internal controls can be effective but should not be relied on as the only strategy for
preventing fraud. Controls can be evaded and circumvented, and human actors have
the authority in certain situations to override or rely on exceptions to controls. Employee
fraud that is directed at advancing a corporate objective – meeting a sales target for a
company/revenue goal – can be easier to rationalize because of the importance of
satisfying a corporate objective (while earning a personal benefit such as a bonus).
Companies have to find the right balance between technology and human behavior.
Fraud is a difficult and intractable problem. Proactive strategies are essential to combat
and minimize a company’s exposure to fraud risks. Abercombie & Fich used to have
a lot of discriminatory policies, in 2002, the brand received public backlash from
Asian Americans for images on T-shirts that depicted Asian stereotypes. A year later, a
class-action suit was filed against the company for alleged discrimination against
African Americans, Asian Americans, and other minority applicants. It was reported that
A&F managers were ordered to deny that a store was hiring if applicants didn't fit a
certain look. The company settled the lawsuit in 2004 without admitting any wrongdoing,
according to Bloomberg. It paid out $40 million and changed its hiring guidelines.

Amazon buying Whole foods is destroying big retailers, Amazon’s mid-2017

acquisition of Whole Foods sent shockwaves through the food and grocery industry.
The merging of a pioneering e-commerce giant and a grocery store with a cult following
has made other retailers nervous (and many are scrambling to catch up by discussing
mergers and launching delivery initiatives of their own). But it’s not just big business
that’s being affected: The Amazon-Whole Foods deal is having dizzying effects on small
food producers which were at one time the national grocer’s main attraction. Pop-up
stores are appearing all over the world to offer new experiences, a pop-up store
can look like a regular store, but many brands use them to create unique and engaging
physical shopping experiences because they provide flexibility and the opportunity to
experiment with less risk. The richest retailer is Jeff Bezos with a net worth of
$132.5 billion, Jeff Bezos founded e-commerce colossus Amazon in 1994 out of his
garage in Seattle. He runs it as CEO and owns an 11.1% stake. Between March and
April 2020, amid the pandemic, Amazon said it hired 175,000 additional workers. Retail
apocalypse is affecting a majority of big retailers all over the world, part of the
explanation for retail chains' difficulties since 2017—what some have called the "retail
apocalypse"—is the continuing trend of Americans making purchases online.
Consumers enjoy the freedom of shopping on their computer or phone and avoiding
trips to a store that may not have had what they were looking for anyway. Online sales
skyrocketed over the past years, over the last few years, e-commerce has become
an indispensable part of the global retail framework. Like many other industries, the
retail landscape has undergone a substantial transformation following the advent of the
internet, and thanks to the ongoing digitalization of modern life, consumers from virtually
every country now profit from the perks of online transactions. As internet access and
adoption are rapidly increasing around the globe, the number of digital buyers
worldwide keeps climbing every year. M-commerce is the new buzzword, mobile
devices, especially smartphones, are facilitating the re-imagination of the process of
shopping as we see it today. M-commerce is the name of the game and smartphones
infused with advanced and intuitive technology are making shopping more engaging,
personalized and an infinitely simpler process. The purchase of products and services
has taken a whole new meaning altogether. Stores are meant to make you lose track
of time, a great way to kill time is literally shopping until you drop. At Boston
University you can study the history of shopping.

The top 10 hot retails in 2020, Brick and mortar, the hot retail trend in 2020 is that
brick and mortar still matter. The media talk about the brick-and-mortar apocalypse and
the closure of all these stores, and what they don't mention are all the stores that are
opening up, and how crucial the interaction between brick-and-mortar locations and the
web is for the customer's experience. Mobility, it’s all about mobility. That’s being able
to serve the customer on a mobile device by delivering a great customer experience,
because you can be out on the shop floor helping the customer, and it also frees up
selling space in the store. In-store data, I believe it’s really going to be data that’s
gathered in the store that is going to help retailers optimize their store and shelf. At the
end of the day for people like us shoppers, who shop the shelf, it is the best experience
possible. The marriage of first party and third party data, big data with your first-
party data married with collective third-party data, bringing in third-party data into all the
similar ways that analytics can be consumed. The opportunities are enormous. RFID-
enabled merchandise, we're starting to see a lot more RFID-enabled merchandise
being rolled out, which we're integrating with our mobile approach, so that we can use a
mobile device to scan those codes and scan the entire fascia, rather than individual
products, to make sure that we have the product that we've promised to the consumer.
Robots in stores, we’ll see more and more and more of these technologies, where
you’ll see robots traversing these retail stores, capturing inventory, and also capturing
user habits and tracking how users are spending their money. Employee experience,
we will find retailers more able to engage their employees on a day-to-day basis to
improve customer experience. Retailers starting to turn their focus on home, making
sure that their employees love work and are more engaged to provide that customer
experience. Human Interaction, now retailers are starting to understand just how
valuable the store associate is. We can never underestimate the concept of the human
interaction. Having great employees that work for you, that are store associates, can
really drive loyalty. People like one-on-one relationships. Focus on the non-
purchaser, the hottest retail trend is not about ecommerce. 80% of visitors to a store do
not complete a purchase. That is the biggest ignored opportunity by the entire industry –
the non-purchaser. We can save 5% of the sales walking out of the store. That’s the
biggest opportunity for retail today. And lastly, Broad understanding of the consumer,
One of the big things that people are focused on is not just knowing your customer, but

Autonomous everything, in 2020 this trend of machines talking to machines –

refrigerators telling virtual assistants to buy milk or printers notifying Amazon that they
ran out of toner–and the digitalization of active customer decisions will only increase.
The AI market in general is expected to grow to a $190 billion industry by 2025,
according to research firm Markets and Markets. The growth in autonomy goes well
beyond the trend of autonomous mobility. It's about shops like Amazon Go where you
can walk in and out without doing anything; the shop is completely autonomous. It's
about home speakers like the Amazon Echo that will be able to detect if you're having a
heart attack and raise the alarm on your own. Brands as the new religion, I think that
in this autonomous world and the rise of the premium service and self-purchasing,
brand image will only gain in importance. That's because the former will push every
product and service towards a commodity, and sharing a unique voice and vision will
become the essence of staying afloat. Just as we used to turn to religion to help us fulfill
our hopes and dreams, and to help safeguard society and the world, brands are
constantly moving into this sweet spot. Value of trust, huge responsibility comes with
great power. And now that brands are starting to play an even more pivotal role in our
lives and in society, they will have to start acting accordingly. Trust and transparency
will only gain in importance and value in these times of misleading information, serious
infringements, data breaches and unfair use of personal data. Brands can only become
true partners in our lives if they prove us that they can be trusted with our behavioral,
contextual and emotional data. The Chief Ethical Officer, humans are definitely not
perfect, and now that AI technologies, automation and customization really put brands,
and especially their marketers, in a Temptation Island-like environment when it comes
to data usage, we need to find ways to stop these impulses from being followed. I
believe that we will see a rise in this type of ethical role across companies, to overcome
the tempting possibility of using customer data in unethical ways and to stimulate the
production of products and services that are good and not harmful to the environment.
They will be the ones who will guard over the algorithmic transparency and the opening
up of the current often black box-like data and AI management. Every company is
becoming a healthcare company, this trend is part of the way in which brands are
looking to maintain direct contact with customers and make themselves indispensable,
far beyond convenience. And this is becoming increasingly important to the graying
population. So it really makes sense that so many existing companies from different
industries are moving into the healthcare sector, and often in a way that is far more
innovative, smart and proactive than traditional players. The end of trade off, over the
last decade, consumers have been faced with constant trade: privacy versus
convenience, doing good for the planet versus doing good for themselves, buying
products from ethical companies versus buying cheap stuff. We're confronted with this
trade every day. In the next few years, this trade will slowly begin to disappear. Google
is now developing a new approach: to do as much as possible with the least amount of
data possible. So, slowly the trade-off is decreasing. In the next few years, many of the
innovations that we will see, will bring us closer to this world without trade off.

Retail trade refers to buying goods from manufacturers or wholesalers and sell the
same to the ultimate consumers. Those who are engaged in retail trade are called
retailers. Retail trade generally involves dealing in a variety of items. A retailer buys
goods in small quantity from wholesalers or manufacturers and the same directly to
ultimate consumers. It is normally carried on in or near the place of ultimate consumers.
Retail traders generally buy goods on credit and sell the same for cash. A retailer has
indirect relation with the manufacturer (through wholesalers) but direct link with the
consumers. Retailers provide useful services to the consumers, wholesalers, and
manufacturers. They also help wholesalers and manufacturers in the distribution of
products to the final consumers scattered over a large geographic area. By undertaking
personal selling efforts, retail traders help producers and manufacturers in the process
of actualizing the sale of the products. Retailers relieve producers from making
individual sales to consumers in small quantities. This enables producers to operate at
relatively large scale, and thereby fully concentrate on other activities. They also collect
information about the taste, preferences, and attitudes of customers and communicate
the same to the manufacturers. Manufacturers may use such information to make
necessary marketing decisions. Retail traders also help in increasing the sale of
products by participating in various promotional activities carried by manufacturers and
distributors to increase the sale of their products. They procure different varieties of
goods from wholesalers and hold adequate stock of the same to make them available to
the ultimate consumers as and when required. Retailers generally buy goods and sell
the same to customers according to their requirements. Also, consumers can buy goods
of their choice whenever they need as retailers as normally situated very near to the
residential areas and remain open for long hours. There are 2 types of retailers:

 Itinerant retailers – are small traders who keep on moving from place to place in
order to sell their goods directly to the consumers. As these retailers do not have
any fixed place of business, they keep their limited inventory of merchandise
either at home or at some other place.
 Fixed shop retailers – are those traders who carry on their business in fixed
shops where customers can easily reach and make their purchases. These
shops are usually located at market places or commercial areas or near
residential localities and include general stores, medicine store, ready-made
garments shop.

In a nutshell, buying and selling of goods and services within the geographical
boundaries of a country is referred to as internal trade. On the basis of volume of goods
traded, internal trade may be classified into wholesale trade and retail trade. Retail trade
refers to buying goods from the manufacturers or wholesalers and selling them to the
ultimate consumers.