Retail, defined as the activity of selling goods or services directly to the end consumers, is among the largest employers and largest industry sectors in both developed and developing economies. Research in retail operations has grown tremendously over the last two decades since the initial seminal work by Fisher et al. (2000). Since then, the retail landscape has changed enormously, specifically because the development of online and on-demand retail. This development has been characterized in a review of 20 years of research in this journal (Caro et al. 2020). Research in operations management has followed this change in industry structure, with both modeling and empirical papers studying a wide variety of retail formats and retail channels. However, with little exception, the focus of these studies is more or less entirely on profit-maximizing objectives of the retailer, without much attention to considerations of sustainability and social responsibility.
Within the wider scope of responsible operations, retail has an important and visible role to play that has received increasing attention in the society at large. We strongly believe that it is the role of academic research to address the wider scope of responsible operations in retail, beyond the mere profitability of companies and business models in the sector.
With this special issue, we call for innovative and impactful research that advances the theoretical and empirical understanding of responsible retail operations, and provides managers and educators with tools and insights to deploy more responsibility in retail operations. We are open to any research methods, including theoretical, empirical and behavioral work.
For a paper to qualify, two conditions need to be met: (1) The outcome variable/objective function needs to include a responsible metric, i.e., it is not enough to have a traditional cost/profit outcome variable/model that evaluates the effects on a responsible outcome, or a traditional cost/profit outcome variable/model that is set in a setting where responsible outcomes play a role. (2) The setting must be retail, defined as a directly consumer-facing activity, with the end-consumer (households or individuals) paying for a product or a service. In this definition, we decide to include not only physical stores and online retail for physical products, but also restaurants, banks, airlines, amusement parks, etc., but decide to exclude healthcare services.