Big-Box Store

Basics

• A Term for a rather recent form of commerce
• It essentially merges a Warehouse and a Point of Sale
• Thus the need for warehouses can be reduced, increasing profits, and the consumer can "get everything at one store"
• Most are designed primarily around car tranit, and thus have huge Parking Lots
  • This has gathered criticism as a failure of Urban Planning (See Complete Streets and New Urbanism )

Issues

• This section goes over issues inherent in the system, not enviromental/social/urban planning issues
• Given that there is little storage, as most is "on the shelf" it is almost at times like the two worlds/universes are "overlapped"
• Thus it fails as a warehouse, due to people blocking workers/preventing Warehouse Automation (As well as it being an Engineered Space to increase profit, but this reduces organizational efficiency), and can fail at times as a Point of Sale due to sheer scale / stocking issues (and the intentional dissorganization being confusing to new customers)

External Links

• The Wikipedia Page on Big-Box Stores
• Hypermarkets/Superstores, the (even) more diverse product selection version of this model