An important contribution to our understanding of the distribution of retail activities, particularly within cities, this book provides a critical review of the literature on the subject. It points out the major general propositions concerning retailing from the geographical point of view, and identifies key research problems, which need to be examined in order to push forward the frontiers of this sub field of economic geography. It presents a major critique of the central-place model, which has come to hold an important place in the methodology of economic geography, and clearly and decisively shows the model to be static, deterministic, retrospective and of little value for predictive purposes.