Wholesale:
The business of buying goods in large quantities and selling them especially to retailers for resale is called wholesale.
Wholesaling, Distributing And Retailing
This highly selectable master file offers today's decision makers, in all levels of management, within the retail, wholesale, and distribution industries helpful information. These decision-making executives are leaders in their respective industries. They influence spending for all products and services that can improve their organization's efficiency and position in the marketplace.
In such a retailing environment, how do wholesale markets react? These, and other approaches, include:
• Being pro-active. Wholesale markets that sit back and wait for business to come to them will rapidly cease to be relevant. They have to explore ways to attract business by surveying their customers and identifying their needs. Retailers, for example, may feel the need for improve retail markets, the development of which could provide a measure of competition for supermarkets. Market logistics may need to be re-examined, together with trading hours, in order to maximize the convenience for customers and minimize the delay between harvest and sale. Wholesale markets need to look to their strengths. In many cases, for example, they should be able to supply locally produced produce more freshly than supermarkets that operate just one distribution centre per country.
• Identifying new services. The Foundation has examined a range of services that can be provided. Although supermarket chains in one or two countries may be prepared to site their distribution centres and other facilities in wholesale markets, in most cases this is unlikely to happen and there is little evidence that it has happened to date. Some of the other services identified by Foundation members as being suitable for inclusion on the land of existing markets, however this can be difficult to gain acceptance. Thus markets need to be aware of their real potential for capturing business from supermarket chains. If such potential is limited than they need to explore ways of maximizing business from non-supermarket customers.
• Serving non-supermarket retailers and caterers. If supermarkets do not use the services of wholesale markets then the markets need to look at how they can best serve these other categories of customer. Both retailers and caterers would be attracted by the provision of commercial wholesale cash-and-carry facilities. Such a store in a wholesale market compound would enable traditional fruit and vegetable retailers to diversify into selling new products. It may also encourage dry-goods retailers who have not previously sold fruits and vegetables to start doing so. Many retailers, but particularly larger stores and independent chains that are not large enough to justify having their own distribution centres, could benefit from the one-stop-shop concept, i.e. by being able to buy fruits and vegetables, fish, meat and dairy products and dry goods at one wholesale market location.
• Improving procurement arrangements. Some would argue that such arrangements also enable the retailers to squeeze the farmers’ margins, but that is another discussion. Wholesalers working in traditional wholesale markets cannot dismiss these trends as a supermarket fad of little relevance to them. If they see caterers as potential customers they will also in the future have to be in a position to offer “traceability.” Some British travel agents, for example, are now demanding assurances from hotels regarding the reliability of their food supplies before agreeing to include the hotels in their brochures, thus forcing the hotels to introduce preferred supplier and traceability arrangements. Wholesalers in markets will therefore need to strengthen linkages with farmers in the same way as supermarkets are doing; this will probably lead to reduced opportunities for small farmers and much consolidation of farms, as it is virtually impossible for supermarkets or wholesalers to work with individual small farms. Farmers will be increasingly called upon to specialize. Small wholesalers are unlikely to be able to take such initiatives without support, and this seems to be a role for the market management.