In nine pages this paper presents a discount retail industry overview with the primary emphasis on the 'big three' Target, Kmart, and Wal Mart. Six sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: CC6_KSdiscRetail.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Kmart shoppers!" came to be a term of ridicule among trend-conscious teens a generation ago, and nearly every teen alive would rather be dead as be "caught" in a Kmart
store by a peer. Never mind that the peer was there to see... Such was the early image of the discount retailers.
In a time that the "dime store" no longer carried any dime-priced merchandise and all of retail centered on department stores, the emerging model of the discount retailer was
new and uncomfortable. Shoppers got over that discomfort as they rode an economic roller coaster in the 1970s and 1980s, however, and by the 1990s those discounters were fully
accepted as being mainstream. Demographers predicted in the mid-1990s that we were about to witness a shift in economic classes, that the middle
class would shrink as a few moved into the upper class while a great many more slid into the working class (Myers, 1996). That scenario did indeed occur, despite
the fact that not many retailers gave any heed to the predictions at the time. Generally, it has been Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target that used this shift to their
advantage, though smaller discounters such as Dollar General have benefitted too. Though Kmart recently filed for bankruptcy protection and regional discounters such as
Ames and Maxway have not seen stellar success, the discount retail industry in general appears to have a strong future.
Leading Competitors Wal-Mart The worlds largest retailer, Wal-Mart is known throughout the discount retail industry for it innovations of in-store marketing; tracking each