Retailers and Their Stores

Ranking retailers and their competition based on number of stores. This question showed up on chat recently and it turns out to be both surprisingly easy and difficult to answer. Two well know trade journals, Stores and Chain Store Age, publish this data in their annual “Top 100” lists but finding the lists online is not straight forward. Here’s what to do:

Chain Store Age’s “Top 100 Retailers” appears in their August issue and is available through Business Source Premier and ABI. The best search strategy is to search for the word “top” in the title. Subject headings for “Rankings” and “Ratings and Rankings” bring up inconsistent results. Students might also want to read their ranking of “High Performance Retailers” which is published in November.

Stores magazine is not available full text in any of our databases although it is indexed in Business Source. The Stores website offers all their “Top 100 Lists” in PDF for free. Their report on the “Top 100 Retailers” from the July issue also breaks out the top stores in these categories: apparel, department stores, entertainment retailers, large-format retailers, small-format retailers, supermarkets, office supply stores, non-store retailers, home improvement retailers and restaurants. Stores also publishes rankings for the “Hot 100 Retailers” which measures store growth not size, the “Favorite 50” which is a list of top consumer rated e-commerce sites, and the “Top 250 Global Retailers."