By Dr. Maurice Yeates, Christopher Daniel and Dr. Tony Hernandez

This paper is directed toward providing data-based assessments, in the form of ranked indices, of Canada’s leading retail companies. The information that is used in this study is derived from Canada’s Leading Retailers published annually by the CSCA. The premise is that the indices that are constructed tell us something about the comparative viability of a corporation’s business operation as it is configured for the year for which the data is available. Rankings of just about anything are all the vogue these days for they are a way of distilling qualitative and quantitative information to a digestible form. It must be recognized, however, that though transparency may appear to be enhanced, there can be no fully acceptable way in any situation to define comparable levels of performance.  This report outlines a method of ranking retail business performance by creating a composite index of performance based on:

• Size
• Efficiency
• Competitiveness