What are the big chains?

Most of us are familiar with the idea of retail chain stores. These include fast food restaurants, shoe stores, clothing retailers, wireless phone retailers, retail banks, and rental car companies.

It is surprising to realize that while a retail chain that has 100 locations, some have several thousand locations. Yes, thousands, even tens of thousands. While these numbers are staggering, the issues facing these companies starts to get interesting around the 50-location mark. The point is that the scalability of a retail marketing system starts to break down at a certain point, where the cost-benefit structure of more locations, hence more customers, changes for the worse.

In ecommerce, for example, you pretty much have fixed costs. It costs a marginal amount of more money to serve millions more customers. So if you increase the traffic, you increase sales, and revenues, but do not increase your operational costs. In the bricks and mortar world, you increase the traffic, and your operational costs skyrocket, unless you use the right combination of communications, instructions, and processes.

We'll evaluate some of these processes here and open them up for discussion amongst our readers. Thanks again for visiting!