By Dr. Maurice Yeates and Dr. Tony Hernandez

E-Retail is becoming an important channel for retail growth globally and in Canada. In this paper we attempt to put numbers on the magnitude and growth of national E-Retail, and use these to address two issues. The first is whether, and if so why, the country underperforms in the adoption of E-Retail. This can be viewed as a matter of national competitiveness. The second is the apparent impact of E-Retail on store-based developments, colloquially referred to as ‘bricks and mortar’. This is an important issue with respect to current and future infrastructure development strategies at the macro-level, i.e., How much more retail space can future population and economic growth support given the incursion of E-Retail?