Retaillance: a conceptual framework and review of surveillance in retail

ABSTRACT

Retaillance is surveillance in a brick-and-mortar retail setting. In today’s world, brick-and-mortar retailers are threatened by competition from online retailers and the need to compete with sellers not just in the same city or country, but from all over the world. Retailers have, therefore, moved beyond the routine surveillance of consumers for security reasons, and begun to compete for consumers’ personal and shopping data, in an effort to gain competitive advantage. Surprisingly, published academic research relevant to surveillance in a retail setting is quite limited. To address this apparent gap, this interdisciplinary literature review will first provide both a new definition and conceptual model of what surveillance in physical retail entails, before reviewing how retailers view retaillance, how retaillance impacts consumers and their relationships with retailers, along with associated moral and ethical dilemmas. Most importantly, we utilize our review as an opportunity to highlight a variety of directions for future research that can contribute to our understanding of the impact of retaillance and add to the vitality of the fields of retailing and marketing by opening new and unexplored areas of study.

KEYWORDS:

• Retaillance
• retail
• retailing
• surveillance
• marketing
• consumer behaviour
• COVID-19 pandemic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. What Turow et al. call ‘resignation,’ Romele et al. (2017) call ‘voluntary servitude’ which is a matter of voluntary submission and not coercion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nada Elnahla

Nada Elnahla has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is presently a Ph.D. candidate at Sprott School of Business, Carleton University. Her current research interests include retail surveillance, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on retail, disposal, narratology, consumer behaviour, and marketing history.

Leighann C. Neilson is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Sprott School of Business, Carleton University. Her current research interests include marketing history, consumer culture theory and marketing in arts and culture organizations.