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Retail Is The Selling Of Goods Or Merchandise?

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Retail can be defined as the selling of goods or merchandise to the public consumer, which can be done in numerous ways, such as over the phone, door-to-door, ecommerce or over the counter. Retail can be categorised based on the products being sold, hence food products, durable goods (motor vehicles, house-ware items), consumable goods (clothing) and art commodities. Initially this industry was dominated by family owned businesses. This began to change when family owned businesses began to expand, changing into large retail chain stores, for example Walmart and Ford Motors. This also changed the need to interact with machines and the growing ability of interacting with people. Although having family oriented foundations in the retail business, turn over rates are very high. The demographic consists of mostly females, than males, with a low percentage of middle age women and a high percentage of younger women, tending to be mostly students. Due to this, this industry is known for its abundance of part-time jobs rather than full-time opportunities. Employers in retail tend to “place importance on hard currencies, such as qualifications and work experience and soft currencies such as personal skills and appearance and accent” (Nickson et al. 67). Hence aesthetic labour is mostly used. This refers to the “employment of workers with certain embodied capacities and attributes that favourable appeal to customers and which are then organisationally mobilised, developed and

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