The Evolution And Innovation Of Chinese Department Stores

Department stores once played a prominent role in national economic systemwith the characters of strong timeliness, convenience and scalization promoting socialconsumer commodities’ production and circulation. After more than100years’ trialsand hardships, Chinese department store industry has earned a great development withprofound changes. In recent years, with a variety of new retail formats’ rapiddevelopment and the operation problems in department store itself, the domesticdepartment store industry is encountering great difficulties. As the former “leader ofretail ", department store’s revolution is a result of economic, social and other factors.Thus the evolution study of department store industry has become an important issue.Therefore, we need to conduct in-depth analysis to get unique understandings of thelaws in department store industry’s formation and evolution in order to givesuggestions for its better development in the future.After1970s, faced with dynamic and complicated economic phenomena, thestatic equilibrium economics theory with the methodological basis of physicalism andmechnicalism has gradually been demonstrated with deficiencies and defects. Undersuch situation, abandoning the rational assumption and static equilibrium inmainstream economics, evolutionary economics theory proposes dynamic and historicmethods and establishes a research framework for analyzing dynamic economics’development applying the biological mechanisms of heredity, mutation, pathdependence, selection and etc.Based on the theory of evolutionary economics and applying relevant analyzingmethod, this paper conducts an analysis of the evolution process and mechanism inChinese department stores industry and aims to provide ideas and recommendationsfor its future development combined with the core concept "innovative practices" inevolutionary economy. This paper is mainly divided into five parts: the first partintroduces the study purpose, meanings, relevant theoretical literatures, researchmethods and contents; the second part describes the origination and development ofthe revolutionary economic thoughts together with the core elements; the third part isthe analysis part of the evolution process of Chinese department store industry mainlyfrom four aspects: evolution history, evolution forms, evolution characters and thedynamic mechanism; the fourth part analyzes the evolution mechanism combining hereditary, mutation, selection and maintenance the four aspects and figures out theaffecting factors in Chinese department store industry with a historical andenvironmental point of view. The fifth part provides proposes the concept ofdepartment stores’“innovation practices” from the evolution perspective offeringideas for future innovation in Chinese department stores industry.