Financial Survey of Major U.K. Department Stores published by Financial Analysis Group Limited. 114pp. £50.

At various times certain functions in industry become not merely fashionable, but exert considerable dominance over other functions. This was the case at one time with production; in the immediate post‐war years it was so with marketing; in the 1960s accountancy held sway. Over the past few...

In many ways the Common Market is most uncommon; national tastes, marketing methods, and of course distribution techniques are all very different. This article looks particularly at some of the features of the distribution scene on the continent, at the distribution problems facing the UK....

Not very much work has so far been done by retail organisations in the building of computer‐based financial models, but it is neither complex nor necessarily expensive. Financial parameters would include such items as forecasted sales, rents and rates of shop locations, and gross margins;...

Retail shares have performed fairly creditably against the market. Best of all are food retailing shares. While the FT index at the beginning of October was some 11% from its peak this year, food retail shares, according to the actuaries index, were registering only a fractional fall, from 149,...

Retailers may be forgiven if they have filed away the Government's Fair Trading Bill for future reference, and got on with the business of boosting turnover this Christmas.

A retailing company in Cornwall, which was established seven years ago with a working capital of £2,000, now brings in a pre‐tax profit of 16% on a turnover of £3½m. At the same time it advertises on its goods ‘an all round discount on average retail prices of something above 30%’. If...

Two metropolitan cities of similar size and less than 400 Kilometres apart, yet London and Paris display vastly contrasting patterns of retailing. Retailing, unlike manufacturing industry, has yet to go truly multi‐national in its organisation; but the trends in this direction are clear....

Job advertisements over the past two or three years have increasingly used the word ‘development’ as part of the job description or title. A whole range of industry has been demanding people to fill these often entirely new positions in engineering, the pure service industries, packaging,...

The trend towards large scale retailing, both on the continent and in the UK, is leading inexorably towards a polarisation of outlets which is creating signficant gaps in our shopping facilities. In the UK, it is arguable that the rigidity of our planning system is inhibiting the expansion of...