Dictionary of Retailing and Merchandising

I never thought I'd write a review of a dictionary, at least not as it related to data management. However, when I'm working on definitions for a data model, I believe having an authoritative source nearby is a good thing. Writing definitions isn't the most exciting modeler activity, but at least you can have a great head start with the proper reference. This dictionary contains common acronyms, synonyms and abbreviations found in the retail sector. It starts with "AAMA" [See American Apparel Manufacturers Association] and ends with "zoning price" [A geographic pricing policy in which the seller divides a geographic area into zones and charges each buyer in a given zone the base price plus the standard freight rate for that zone. See "market segmentation". Synonymous with "zone delivered pricing"; "zone pricing."] This work is definitely focused on US terminology, but does have entries for VAT and some other international concepts. While I won't be sitting down and reading this work from cover to cover, I have used it when working with data and process models for retail clients and it has been a valuable source of definitions and knowledge for my teams. I did find it odd that a key retailing term, "household" was not included, but it is referenced in a related term, "geodemography" [A retailer's tool that links households with geographic locations to identify regional lifestyles that impact directly on consumer attributes, behavior, and buying patterns.] At just over 250 pages, it isn't a comprehensive guide to retailing, but it could be a great start for further research. This book also contains an appendix of approximately 200 acronyms from the retail sector. Overall this is a valuable resource for data management professionals working in retail-related sectors.

New to the retail industry I felt this was a book that I just had to have. It is exactly what you would expect it to be. Laid out in the same format as a regular dictionary this book provides concise but sufficient definions of regularly occuring words in retailing (iceburg principal, planogram, INP etc). I as impressed that any mathamatically concepts were diagramed with the appropriate equations.This book will not likely be of much use to someone who has been in the retail industry for any significant legth of time.