期刊名称：Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics / Department of Economic Studies, University of Dundee
印刷版ISSN：1473-236X
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
出版社：Dundee University
摘要：The rise of large-scale retailing represents arguably one of the success stories of
British business in the second half of the twentieth century. Growing consumer
prosperity after the Second World War saw rising demand for an ever widening
array of consumer products, leading Prime Minister Harold MacMillan to
famously suggest that the public had ‘never had it so good’. To match these
changes innovations from the United States were adopted by leading British
retailers from the 1950s, especially in the fields of store size and layout, product
packaging and marketing. A new wave of innovation emerged, this time
generated from within, during the ‘Golden Age’ of retailing from the mid- 1970s
to the mid-1990s, when further advances in new store development, supply
chain management and the use of information technology became widespread.
Thus over the period of half a century British retailing had become a leading
sector for innovation within British business. As a result by the 1990s British
retailing had not only become oligopolistic, and the subject of repeated antimonopoly
investigation, but the largest retailers were now turning to
internationalisation as they themselves began to transfer their own technological
know-how into new markets.
