CHAPTER 1: Introduction to the World of Retailing

        Retailing is a set of business activities that adds value to the products and services sold to consumers for their personal or family use. This means that a retailer is a business that sells products or services to consumers for personal or family use. There are numerous examples of retailers such as Wendy’s, Amazon and Avon. Besides that, there are also firms that are retailers and wholesalers at the same time which they sell to other business as well as consumers. For example, United Airlines and Bank of America.

  In addition, Retailers play important role in a supply chain. A Supply Chain is a set of firms that make and deliver a given set of goods and services to the ultimate consumer. So, retailers are the final business within a supply chain which links manufacturers to consumers.

  Moreover, retailing is very important in our society. These are because retailing is not for business purpose only but also significance towards economic. The retail sales is increasingly over $4.1 trillion in annual U.S. sales in 2005. Furthermore, the employment also increase in 2005 that is over 24 million people which it shows that United State is one of the largest sectors for job growth. On the other part, retailing also has their social responsibility which is best known as corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility is the voluntary actions taken by a company to address the ethical, social, and environmental impacts of its business operations, in addition to the concerns of its stakeholders. For example, Starbucks pays its farmers 42% more than the commodity price of Arabica coffee beans.

     Last but not least, retailing also offers various careers and entrepreneurial opportunities. For example, store management, merchandise management and corporate staff. These careers are very important in order to ensure that the business retailing are running smoothly. There are very benefits that we can get from the jobs in retailing. For example, retailers will pay the starting wages at the average and some retailers also pay for graduate school.