Change management of the small retailer in Muang district, Trat province

Abstract

          The objectives of this research were; 1) to study current changes in conducting the retail businesses in Thailand especially in the region of Muang district, Trat province, 2) to study froms of change management for the retail businesses in Muang district, Trat province, 3) to study the problems, obstacles, and recommendations from the entrepreneurs of the retail businesses in Muang district, Trat province. The sample included 191 retail operators which were classified by their personal status and randomly chosen. The research tools included the use of the questionnaire from with reliability value of 0.95. The statistical tools used in analyzing data included the percentage, the mean average, the standard deviation, t-test, and the ANOVA.

            The results, as indicated in the parentheses, showed that the majority of the retail operators were female (69.1%), those who were younger than 31 of age (29.32%), those with academic qualification of National Diploma (28.80%), those with monthly income less than 50,000 THB (48.17%), running the small retail shops or small groceries (48.69%),running family businesses (53.4%), decisions solely made by an operator/ owner of the business (57.07%), having 1-3 family members (59.69%), operating with no subordinates (65.97%), being in the business for 1-5 years (50.26%), and self-funding the business (94.24%).

         The research also found that change management executed by the retail operators in the region of Muang district, Trat province, that covered the aspects of the development for adaptability, the consolidation and change expansion, and the creation of knowledge for sustainability of business, were at a high level in overall. Regarding the aspect of strategic planning, it was only at moderate level. Where studied the opinions related to change management of the retail operators as classified by their backgrounds, in overall, found that the differences in gender, age, forms of business, number of employee, length of conducting the business, and sources of capital had no impact on change management attempted by the retail operators with no statistic significant difference. Where it came to the differences in education backgrounds, monthly-income levels, types of retailing, decision-making, and the numbers of family member had affected on the change management attempted by the retail operator with static significant difference value of 0.05. Problems and obstacles that the retailers had to deal with were that of high costs merchandise, the growing number of similar type of retail shops that drew customers away, greater number of goods that made impossible for the shops to keep up with in order to satisfy the demands of customers, lack of the availability of employers, and customers switched to shop at department stores.