Cheap Shopping

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background Study

Since economy crisis in Asian countries on 1997, most of the counties are becoming very particular on their economics status especially on the financial aspect. The impact of the crisis also involves almost every entity whom contributes to the economy for instance the suppliers, firms, and even the consumers itself. The situation resulted a new trend among the consumers especially those in middle-income group where they are now more interested in products that can be a substitute that required affordable or even lower price compare to the original product with considerably good quality. In Malaysia, particularly Sarawak, this group of consumers would easily found one of the shops in this category such as 100% Super Store Sdn. Bhd (formerly known as 20 cent shop), Super Save Departmental Store Sdn. Bhd, Jun Rong Store Sdn. Bhd, Tung Yang Department Store Sdn. Bhd, One Stop Sdn.Bhd, and many more.

While target costing considers price and quality separately, historically, price has been considered an indicator of quality (Curry and Riesz, 1988). However, this discount store seems exceptional because the elements of quality are not the major issue since the customer willing to gamble for lower price in order to buy a product. Through lowering the price to the level of ‘attractive price’ do really capture the customer’s attentions where most of them will end up buy the product.

However, in the recent years, the importance of developing new products is again being realized by the world community. This is due to the reason that, the new products which are developed with high degree of quality and reliability dominate today’s world market (Aw, 2005; Chung and Hsu, 2010). These failures are occurring as the contributions of the researches on NPD are not effective enough to address the requirements of the customers. Among those requirements, “quality” and “reliability” are predominant. Quality refers to the...