Our research is conducted with the purpose of investigating and studying the current retail mix. We chose The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf ® as the retail company which operates in Malaysia. This report is important for The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf ® as it helps them to identify their problems and make further improvements to enable them to compete with their competitors, for example, Starbucks.
As we know, The Coffee Bean has a lot of franchises, there were about 750 stores in 22 countries, for example in California, Arizona, Nevada, Singapore, Malaysia, Sabah, Taiwan, UAE, Korea, Brunei, Indonesia, Australia, Shanghai, Israel and Brunei and continues to expand both domestically and internationally. As it is hard for us to conduct a research on this topic in so many countries, therefore we only focus on The Coffee Bean operating in Malaysia. We conducted our research by using searching for detail information through the internet. Besides that, we went to one of the franchises located in Penang to see how the business operates, how the staffs serve their customer and to know more information on the store layout and design.
The result of our research shows us that The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf ® has encountered many problems. As conclusion, we did include several recommendations to The Coffee Bean and to help them to improve in order to earn more profit and their sales can increase.
RETAIL ENVIRONMENT
Retailing is the final activities and steps needed to place merchandise made elsewhere into the hand of the consumer or to provide services to the consumer. Nowadays, retail sector is increasingly being viewed as an important in the economy and to the society.
According to Malaysia Retail Report 2010, it predicts that total retail sales will grow from an estimated US$35bn in 2009 to almost US$58bn by 2014. A low unemployment rate, which rise the disposable incomes and a strong tourism industry are key factors behind the forecast growth.