Question

Distinguish between the following.

Departmental Stores and Chain store.

Answer 1

Basis of Difference	Department Stores	Chain Stores
1.Variety of products	Offer a wide variety of products to customers	Deal in a single line of product and specialise in it
2. Customer services	Offer a wide variety of customer services	Offer limited customer services
3. Location	Located in central parts of cities to attract a large number of customers	Multiple locations—that is, they are spread across cities or towns
4. Pricing policy	Do not follow a fixed pricing policy, as the prices of products vary across departments	Follow a fixed pricing policy across all the shops that are part of a particular chain
5. Cost of failure	Very high cost of failure because of the huge initial and operating expenses	Limited cost of failure because the initial investment is not very large and losses of one shop can be covered by the profits of other shops