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stations and bus stands, and sells consumer items of common use, such as stationery items,

eatables, readymade garments, newspapers and magazines. They are different from market

traders in the sense that they do not change their place of business so frequently.

(iv) Cheap jacks: Cheap jacks are petty retailers who have independent shops of a temporary
nature in a business locality. They keep on changing their business from one locality to another,

depending upon the potentiality of the area. However, the change of place is not as frequent as

in the case of hawkers or market traders. They deal in consumer items as well as services such
as repair of watches, shoes, buckets etc.

Fixed Shop Retailers

This is the most common type of retailing in the market place. As is evident from the name,

these are retail shops who maintain permanent establishment to sell their merchandise. They,

therefore, do not move from place to place to serve their customers. Some of the other

characteristics of such traders are:

Characteristics

(a) Compared with the itinerant traders, normally they have greater resources and operate on a
relatively large scale. However, there are different size groups of fixed shop retailers, varying

from very small to very large.

(b) These retailers may be dealing in different products, including consumer durables as well as

nondurables.
(c) This category of retailers has greater credibility in the minds of customers, and they are in a

position to provide greater services to the customers such as home delivery, guarantees,

repairs, credit facilities, availability of spares, etc.

Types

The fixed-shop retailers can be classified into two distinct types on the basis of the size of their

operations.
These are: (a) small shop-keepers, and (b) large retailers.

The different types of retailers falling under the above two broad heads are described as

follows: