Retail Supply Chains: A Comprehensive Classification Capturing Emerging Trends

The fisheries sector in India, up until the Third Five Year Plan, primarily focused on boosting fish production, with no emphasis given to marketing and logistic issues (Mruthyunjaya in Research report on strategies and options for increasing and sustaining fish and aquaculture production to benefit poor households in India, National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research, and Penang, New Delhi, India, The WorldFish Center, Malaysia, 142 pp, 2004). Due to this, even major fish markets across the country did not have basic amenities. Even international marketing of fish was restricted to exporting raw materials to the pre-processors in the importing countries (Sathiadhas and Narayanakumar in J Biol Edu 11(4):225–241, 1994). However, with the 1991 Economic liberalization Policy and subsequent focus on gains from trade, the fisheries sector was identified as a major foreign exchange earner. The domestic demand for fish too has transformed leading to Indian corporate houses and international players entering the market to capture the share of the ever-growing retail pie. In addition to the entry of new players, the emergence of hedonic consumer behaviour, wherein retail shopping has turned from a chore (Sargent in Dynamic macroeconomic theory, Harvard University Press, 1987) to a process where consumers derive intrinsic enjoyment. This has contributed to retailers developing, modifying, and discarding new retail channel formats to provide consumers a satisfactory experience. Against this backdrop, we attempt to capture the major transformations in retailing structures that have occurred in the domestic retailing of the fisheries sector along with the hindering issues. Given the lack of literature that comprehensively captures the traditional and emerging marketing channels and their underlying supply chains, this study based on field surveys attempts to fill this gap.