INTRODUCTION
Retail shopping behaviour is one of the major factors of the retail marketing. Retail shops environments influence consumer shopping behaviour and effect consumer decision on where to go for shopping. Thus store environments have become so important for retail marketing strategies.
The purpose of this research is to present the empirical findings of the three retail stores which were visited to examine various aspects of the store atmosphere.
For this study 3 clothing stores were investigated. These are GAP, DOROTHY PERKINS and MISSSELFRIDGE. Clothing sector is chosen for research as the competition is strong and you can see the rapid changes easily and very often. And these stores also are high street fashion stores, trendy and their target segments are very similar to each other. This retail stores sell women's outerwear, including dresses, blouses and tops, knitwear, trousers and jeans, suits, jackets, coats and rainwear in the UK. And also these stores were chosen for observing because they are localized in same shopping area and nearly same size. That makes easier to compare these stores.
In this summary 3 clothes store was observed and the finding were analysed. For comparison to findings, simple rating scales was used that from 1-10 where 10 is best and 1 is worst.
GAP
I began my research by visiting GAP first. The store includes woman and men clothes. The first part of the store is allocated for woman clothes. Once you enter the store on the right hand side you see first section which is designed for woman out wear and placed with woman trousers, jeans; you see tops and dresses hung on the left hand side. The second part of the store is designed for man clothes and there are a few dress-stands at this part. All clothing categories can be seen from any point in the store. At one glance you can know where to find blouses, skirts, sweaters, jackets and trousers. Wall shelves carry tops and blouses. It isn’t easy to reach to the items placed on the highest shelves. Most of clothes are assorted according to their colour and size. Service area is located in the middle of the store and it acts as a barrier for customer traffic flow. There is only one wide aisle in the store that is enough to handle two-way traffic flow in the store. And that makes it hard for customers to go to the end of the store from the entry when there is a crowd in the store. During the observation there were 15 customers in the store, 5 of them were waiting in the queue and the aisle was narrow because of the queue. Other customers were attracted to bargain clothes. I chose one top and went to fitting room. The fitting rooms were so chilly as to be downright uncomfortable and they weren’t display accessible to people in wheelchairs because of they were too narrow for a wheelchair to turn.
