Corporate Strategies in Food Retailing and Their Local Impacts: A Case Study of Cardiff

Abstract

The development programmes of major grocery retailers in Britain have transformed the retail systems of many urban areas. Impacts upon patterns of consumer behaviour and shopping provision have been substantial. Although many writers have discussed retailers' changing corporate strategies and their implications for new store development, there is still a need for local case studies. In this paper, therefore, processes of change in grocery provision in Cardiff, a city of almost 300000 population, are examined, mainly over a recent twelve-year period. An initial burst of superstore development was accompanied by closures of many small grocery stores owned by multiple and cooperative organisations. Since about 1986, rates of new store development and of store closure have diminished. These changes were superimposed upon a longer term decline in independent food retailing. The question of trading impact is then investigated through associations over time and space of store openings and closures. Although some of the closures in this analysis appear to be explained, it is clear also that certain characteristics of the stores themselves (particularly size and location) were strongly related to the likelihood of closure. This in turn reflected corporate strategies for growth, repositioning, or retrenchment amongst the multiples concerned, mediated through the local property market and land-use planning policies. The conclusion is that the case study clearly exemplifies the impacts of recent events in British retailing, but that further studies are needed to build a comprehensive understanding of retail change at the local level.

Retail development in Turkey: An account after two decades of shopping malls in the urban scene

“…In the 1990s, the UK's Thatcher government adopted a rather liberal approach to retail planning to deal with increasing globalization of the retail markets. However, this decision had a negative impact on traditional/local retailers located in major city centres, such as Cardiff (Guy, 1996). The number and diversity of local retailers have decreased significantly in the UK, as has the quality of urban spaces in inner city neighbourhoods.…”

Deprivation, Diet, and Food-Retail Access: Findings from the Leeds ‘Food Deserts' Study

“…In examining the complex interlinkages between undernutrition, social exclusion, and health inequalities, that group had drawn attention to retail-developmentinduced differential access to food-retail provision in deprived urban areas (for details of that process, see Guy, 1996;Thomas and Bromley, 1993;Wrigley, 1998), coining the term food deserts to describe the nutrition and public health problems of those areas of poor retail access.`F ood deserts, the Minister of Public Health was told ... are those areas of cities where cheap, nutritious food is virtually unobtainable. Car-less residents, unable to reach out-of-town supermarkets, depend on the corner shop where prices are high, products are processed and fresh fruit and vegetables are poor or non-existent'' (The Independent 11 June 1997, cited in Whitehead, 1998, page 189).…”

The economic and social role of small stores: a review of UK evidence

“…The major causes for this decline have been identified as the undermining of their local markets by the large retailers superstore expansion programmes and entry into the convenience store sector (Baron et al 2001;Guy 1996), and the perceptions of customers who view small stores as having ageing infrastructures and staid shopping environments (Paddison and Calderwood 2007). The evidence underlines the fact that small and independent stores are vital for the social and economic health of society.…”

“…Over the period since 1996, a series of inter-related planning studies in Cardiff have examined the effects of planning guidance on large store development and concluded that instead of achieving its intended aims, the result has been that PPG6 has tended to channel retailers into creating more flexible formats for expansion, often into small stores, largely because of the poor understanding planners have of retailers development strategies and how these impact the retail system overall (Guy and Bennison 2007). While detailed studies of trading impact of store development programmes by the major multiples suggest clear cause and effect links to small store closures, more studies of this type are needed in order to corroborate and extend such insights (Guy 1996). Nevertheless, the Cardiff studies have served to illustrate the complexities of retail change at the local level and demonstrated the crucial role of the local authority in engaging with stakeholders such as government, traders' associations, residents' groups and the voluntary sector to ensure that diverse needs are met in revitalisation programmes (Guy and Duckett 2003).…”