Retailing in the new millennium stands as an exciting, complex and critical sector of business in most developed as well as emerging economies. Today, the retailing industry is being buffeted by a number of forces simultaneously, e.g., increasing competition within and across retailing formats, the growth of online retailing, the advent of a radio frequency identificationa (TM) (RFID) technology, the explosion in customer-level data availability, the global expansion of major retail chains like Wal-Mart and METRO Group and so on. Making sense of it all is not easy but of vital importance to...