Search results

This chapter develops a productivity analysis of the US consumer drug store business using data envelopment analysis. This study concerns itself with five major US consumer drug chains. The output variables used are profit, total revenue, and prescription revenues. The input variables are number of pharmacists, number of drug store assets, and capital equity.

The United States drug store industry is expanding in both sales volume and store count. The most significant market forces shaping these trends are demographic characteristics, economic fundamentals and competitive formats. Demographically, the deceleration of population growth, the ageing of the population and the lifestyles of “baby boomers” are the most significant factors impacting on drug store performance. Limited new shopping centre construction, continued bankruptcies and acquisitions, and consumer concentration on price are the near term economic forces at work in the industry. Competitively, pressure is being applied from outside the industry by the addition of prescription departments in supermarkets and discount department stores. Internally, large discount drug stores have become a new merchandising force. These trends appear to favour the continued growth of well‐capitalised drug store chains that focus on a health and personal care image and emphasise convenience

The present paper compares the protests that CVS, a leading chain retailer, experienced as it attempted to establish a new drug‐store on the Upper West Side of New York City’s borough of Manhattan with those Walgreen, another major chain pharmacy, encountered as it attempted to enter a neighborhood shopping area in Madison, Wisconsin, a medium‐sized city in the mid‐western region of the USA. It finds that well‐educated, affluent residents in both locations believe that they should have input regarding the retail composition of local shopping areas, and that their resistance to new stores can be successful. It also reveals that such consumers may be protective of small retailers and may harbor strong anti‐chain‐store sentiments.

Focuses on the impact of supercenters on traditional food retailers in four markets, including two small cities (Victoria, Texas; Gainesville, Georgia) and two large cities (Columbus, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska). Consumer surveys were conducted in order to assess the effects of the entry of Meijer, Wal‐Mart, Kmart, and Target supercenters. The results show supercenters can gain from 15 to 20 percent of primary shoppers and an even greater proportion of secondary shoppers. Furthermore, the supercenter primary shoppers, and especially those of Wal‐Mart and Meijer, identified low price and assortment more often as the reason for store choice. In comparison, traditional supermarket primary shoppers were less willing to trade off locational convenience or, in some cases, quality and assortment. Wal‐Mart is predicted to continue to rapidly gain share at the expense of competitors who do not differentiate themselves in some significant way.

Received wisdom is that retail change starts in America and later spreads to major western European countries. This was certainly true until the early 1970s when France took the lead in innovation, blinding the retail world with its dazzling regional shopping centres and its massive hypermarkets. To this day the Americans have not succeeded in selling food and non‐food under the same roof with the same panache as the French. But in recent years the Americans have revived their capacity for innovation, especially in the development of speciality chains, some of them sharply focussed in marketing terms and closely supported by the latest in automated systems. Then again, in supermarkets there has been the development of different formats within specific store type categories, of which the food‐drug combination store and the “hybrid” warehouse store are two interesting examples. Lastly there have been significant technological developments in cable TV and viewdata systems, and a number of test teleshopping systems are already in operation. In this first of an irregular series of articles on American retailing, Dr David Rogers outlines these changes, some of which will be discussed in more detail in subsequent features.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the pharmaceutical supply chain for artemisinin‐based combination therapies (ACT) in Ghana.

This study employed an inductive approach in examining the dynamics of the pharmaceutical supply chain. The study also used analytical hierarchical process in identifying factors that are detrimental to the ACT supply chain.

The study revealed that there are basically two main supply channels through which ACT enters the Ghanaian pharmaceutical system – private and public. The ACT network depicts a strong evidence of actor interdependence and long‐term relationships. However, the key supply chain enabler – the use of information technology – was found to be lacking, leading to delays and disruptions in the supply chain system. Disruption was found to be the main detrimental factor to the supply chain although delay was found to be occurring more frequently. Price increases indicated a low effect on the supply network at the pharmacy level, but the general price of the highly subsidised effective ACT (Coartem) remains very high.

Owing to constraints in accessibility, it was challenging to contact all the actors in the network individually, especially the consumer. Drugs considered in the study were the WHO approved ACT, even though efforts were made to compile available anti‐malarial drugs on the market.

This study has provided insights into the supply chain for ACT. The findings of the study are relevant in improving the supply chain system.

The paper brings to the fore the need for a proper pharmaceutical supply chain management in the health sector with regards to one of the world's most infectious and deadly diseases – malaria.

This paper's aim is to investigate how Chinese consumers' purchase intention of private label drugs is associated with price advantage, appearance, store trust, manufacturer trust, and drug quality.

A survey study was conducted in two large cities in China. Subjects were asked to decide whether they would purchase a private label drug over a national brand drug and to evaluate a set of related factors. Data were collected from 230 consumers.

A total of 45 percent of the variance in private label drug purchase intention is explained by the five predictors. Price advantage, store trust, manufacturer trust, and drug quality are all significantly related to purchase intention, whereas appearance is not. None of the control variables (age, gender, health literacy, and income) has a significant relationship with purchase intention. Product quality and service quality are significant predictors of store trust, accounting for 44 percent of its variance.

The private label drug market has great potential in China, yet little is known about what factors influence Chinese consumers' intention to purchase private label drugs.

This paper is one of the first attempts to achieve an in‐depth understanding in this area. The findings of this research will benefit drug retailers and manufacturers who are interested in the Chinese market.

This study seeks to investigate the interaction between marketers' strategic behaviors, social norms, and societal stakeholders within a particular historical time period, the 1960s and 1970s.

The study's findings are based on an analysis of two dominant retail industry trade publications, Chain Store Age and Progressive Grocer.

The analysis reveals an intriguing array of strategic marketing activity throughout these two decades not captured in considerations of marketing strategy at the time. The retailers examined engaged in two interesting behaviors. First, they responded to a wide range of stakeholder demands in a paradoxical fashion. Second, as retailers were confronted with social norms, instead of conforming to these norms they worked to help influence and shape them to their own advantage. This examination of retailers' behaviors over two decades has allowed the authors to present an intriguing new dimension to the understanding of marketing strategy.

The study found that throughout the 1960s and 1970s, marketers appeared to be actively engaged in a social dialogue. Through this dialogue, they not only responded to norms, but also attempted to shape the norms that came to define legitimate behavior for the marketers. This kind of strategic marketing endeavor was not accounted for in the managerial school of thought that dominated marketing thinking at the time.

This study aims to increase understanding of the factors that affect retail pharmacy performance. This paper investigates how various product-, store-, customer- and competitor characteristics affect over-the-counter (OTC) drug sales and thus store performance.

This paper specifies and estimates a hierarchical model comprising scanner-based information, as well as individual-level data from a customer survey.

Results indicate that the drivers of retail pharmacy performance in OTC categories are different from those identified in traditional retailing research.

This is the first study that determines which factors impact the sales of OTC drugs in pharmacies.

While the popular image of the Sherman Act is that of a “trust-busting” statute, conduct remedies have been more common than structural relief. This paper evaluates the effect on economic welfare of conduct remedies that have resulted from ten prominent Sherman Act monopolization cases. In general, we find that in some cases the behavioral relief has had no consequence other than the cost of litigation and cost of compliance; in other cases, the remedies probably reduced consumer welfare. Cases studied are United Shoe Machinery, AT&T, Std. Oil of California, IBM, United Fruit, Kodak, Safeway, GM, Jerrold, and Blue Chip Stamp.