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retail facilities — English
Places and/or opportunities for consenting sellers and consenting buyers to legally exchange relatively small amounts or volumes of goods for money or other goods or services. From time immemorial humans have been trading. There are various ways of small scale trading: goods can change hands (I trade a chicken for your jar of honey); goods may be exchanged for services (I help you pick the apples in your orchard and receive a part of the harvest in return for my labour), goods might be sold for money (I buy your cow for an amount of money mutually agreed upon), and so forth. These transactions took place anywhere, such as along the roads, on street corners and often at a recognised, traditional market place or a family-store (a spaza shop, that is, a shop belonging to one person or family and dealing in a certain type of merchandise), or in the central business district (CBD) (see “central business district”) of a city. Such market places often constituted the entire CBD of an ancient city. In order to purchase or sell things one went to the CBD. Over time retailing has changed a lot, but these traditional ways of retailing still endure in various forms in especially the developing economies, but also in the developed ones although the merchandise might now be more sophisticated. The infrastructure required for retail activities has been modernised and today many retailers do their business from formal shops in buildings specifically erected for this purpose; shops (sellers) now have proper business addresses. Retailers buy goods in bulk from wholesalers and sell it at higher prices to purchasers at their shops with fixed addresses. The price the buyer is now going to pay would probably be much higher because the retailer has to pay a steep rental for the shop and his overheads are thus higher than in the informal market space. The purchaser pays a little (or a lot) more for having the convenience to buy goods in a conveniently located shop. In most modern cities the CBD is not the main retailing space anymore, and most retailing happens at decentralised facilities (like malls and shopping centres). People would rather travel to a nearby shopping centre than to the CBD to make their ordinary, every-day purchases. Owing to this geographical shift of retail areas, many CBDs became abandoned, derelict features (see “central business district” and “gentrification”) where illegal trade, illegal activities, and vice flourish. It would, for instance, be easier to buy crack-cocaine and procure the services of a prostitute in the old CBD, than in the glitzy mall in the newer parts of the city. The official attempts at “sanitising”, revitalising and rejuvenating the old CBDs (see “gentrification”) might in the future shift the main retailing facilities back to the CBDs, but we should not hold our breath! Besides, rentals in rejuvenated CBDs are notoriously high, so the shopper will have to pay even more than previously. And in the developing world no-one would want to lose the ubiquitous spaza shops!
