Ethics in Commerce

The attributes that often influence supermarket choice decisions. Nine frequently cited attributes are:

1. Low prices
2. Choice of national versus private labels
3. Ease of parking and loading
4. Fast checkouts
5. Produce quality
6. Convenience (including hours, location, ease of entrance and parking, ease of finding items)
7. Services (including credit, delivery, return policy, and guarantees)
8. Store personnel (including helpfulness, friendliness, and courtesy)
9. Advertised "specials" in stock

• For your assignment you are to rank these attributes in order of importance to you. After ranking them, take the most important attribute and assign it the value of 10, take the second most important attribute and assign it the value of 9. Continue to do this for your top five attributes with your fifth attribute getting a value of 6.

• Now visit two brick and mortar stores of your choice and assign a value (1 being very poor, 10 being very good) to the stores' performance on your five attributes. Multiply your rank value by their performance value for each attribute and sum the total. Identify the two stores in comparison, Is the store with the highest total points your favorite? If not, why is there a difference? How can retailers use this approach for store planning? Should the retailers offer surveys, employ secret shoppers, what would you do? In addition, what would happen to the comparison if more attributes were used? Please Explain.

The requirements below must be met for your paper to be accepted and graded:

• Write between 750 - 1,250 words (approximately 3 - 5 pages) using Microsoft Word in APA style, see example below.
• Use font size 12 and 1" margins.
• Include cover page and reference page.
• At least 80% of your paper must be original content/writing.
• No more than 20% of your content/information may come from references.
• Use at least three references from outside the course material, one reference must be from EBSCOhost. Text book, lectures, and other materials in the course may be used, but are not counted toward the three reference requirement.
• Cite all reference material (data, dates, graphs, quotes, paraphrased words, values, etc.) in the paper and list on a reference page in APA style.

References must come from sources such as, scholarly journals found in EBSCOhost, CNN, online newspapers such as, The Wall Street Journal, government websites, etc. Sources such as, Wikis, Yahoo Answers, eHow, blogs, etc. are not acceptable for academic writing.