CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Supersize It: The Growth of Retail Chains and the Rise of the "Big Box" Retail Format

August 2008

Working Paper Number:

CES-08-23R

Abstract

This paper documents and explains the recent rise of "big-box" general merchandisers. Data from the Census of Retail Trade for 1977-2007 show that general-merchandise chains grew much faster than specialist retail chains, and that general merchandisers that added the most stores also made the biggest increases to their product offerings. We explain these facts with a stylized model in which a retailer's scale economies interact with consumer gains from one-stop shopping to generate a complementarity between a retailer's scale and scope.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
sale, inventory, retailer, consumer, retailing, retail, merchandise, store, grocery, supermarket

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech, including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Standard Industrial Classification, New York Times, Census Bureau Longitudinal Business Database, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, Washington University, Census of Retail Trade, Wal-Mart, North American Industry Classi

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