Shopping venues

From markets to e-commerce

Several millennia have elapsed between the emergence of bartering, the first type of commercial exchange, and this century’s e-commerce. In Ancient Egypt in the 3^rd millennium BCE markets already provided a venue for merchants to join together and offer consumers a wide variety of products from different places. In Roman times, the forum was both a political and a commercial hub, the heart of any town.

Markets played a central role in commerce from the Middle Ages onward. Whether permanent or temporary, they were the places where growers and livestock farmers came to sell their produce and proved crucial for supplying towns with provisions. Renowned annual fairs added an international dimension. Markets played a social role as well as a commercial one, as places where people met and interacted, and where ideas were circulated. To complement the goods on offer, craftspeople, bakers and pork butchers set up stalls all over town, while other butchers and fishmongers had to group together in specific streets.

There was an extraordinary boom in trade in the 19^th century. Groceries and general food stores were on the increase. The revolution started with the appearance of self-service in the US in 1916 and the first supermarket in 1930. Supermarkets sold goods at lower prices than small shops, made feasible through high stock rotation, a reduced workforce and locations on the outskirts of town. The concept arrived in Europe in the 1950s.

The second major shift took place in the late 1990s with e-commerce, which seems set for a promising future. The encounter between sellers and buyers, product evaluation and transactions are now wholly virtual.

Shopping venues in the 21st century

Today’s supermarkets, hypermarkets and shopping centres are undeniably successful. Sometimes located in the centre of town or on busy main thoroughfares, they are favoured by some simply because they are so handy. For others, shopping centres have become a living space, meeting more than just people’s buying needs by reproducing urban life, with activities, childcare centres and cafés.

The proliferation of shopping centres has also led to the fear of the suffocation of local shops, which play a role of social cohesion in neighbourhood or village life. A large number of small shops have indeed disappeared over the past fifty years. However, artisan and specialist shops (bakeries, delicatessens, organic food shops) keep going by offering certain values such as expertise, passion for the profession and quality. Open-air markets have also maintained their appeal for similar reasons.

Other local shops have appeared in the last twenty years or so, such as neighbourhood mini-markets, especially in streets which are busy in the evenings, and service station and train station kiosks. They offer longer opening hours and cater for customers in transit, who shop outside normal opening hours or who need a product immediately.

Public adaptation

When hard discount stores first arrived on the scene with even more competitive prices, they offended some consumers. With a presentation that is stark, to say the least, prices so low that the goods were viewed with suspicion and a limited choice of products, they appeared to retail ‘for the poor’. However, nowadays they attract all sectors of the population, both high and low income households and those who prefer to cut their expenditure on everyday consumer products in order to purchase other pleasures in life.