RCSC 114 Introduction to Retailing
Gain insight into the dynamic world of retailing and many facets of the business of retailing from a consumer-centric perspective. Explore how a retail business works, the issues and challenges involved in retailing, and the future of retailing. Topics include retail management and business practices, consumer behavior, and career options in this exciting industry.
RCSC 150B1 Consumers, Environment and Sustainability
Explore consumption and sustainability from personal, household, community, and global perspectives and examine the role of shoppers, retailers, manufacturers and producers, regulators, and environmental organizations in promoting environmentally sustainable consumption. Use individual assessments and personal reflections to understand how your own consumption choices impact the Earth, natural resources, other cultures, and global climate change. The course includes diverse perspectives, discussions, interactive and group activities, and a service learning team project with a community organization.
RCSC 195 Introduction to the Retailing & Consumer Science Program
Successfully transition into the Retailing and Consumer Science (RCSC) major. Explore ethical and professional behavior within the RCSC program, content and sequencing of courses, and careers in retailing and fashion through discussions, in-class activities, and writing assignments.
RCSC 205 Merchandise Planning and Control
This course is essential for anyone seeking a career in the retailing industry in fields such as merchandising, buying, planning, retail marketing, operations, sales, and brand management. Topics include retail planning and control procedures, computing prices and markups, inventory control, sales reporting, productivity metrics, and retail calendar impact. It includes discussions on current industry developments and students learn about practical business decisions that increase profitability.
RCSC 205A Merchandise Planning and Control/Buying Lab
This introduction to Microsoft Excel for merchandising and retail buying decision making includes the use of basic mathematical operations, formulas and functions, formatting, and creating charts and graphs. This lab is designed to support the learning objectives and related activities in RCSC 205: Merchandise Planning and Control.
RCSC 220 Markets, Finance and Retailing
Survey of financial concepts and principles in the context of the consumer marketplace and retailing business. Students will use economic theory and financial analysis to relate consumer actions, business decisions, and financial performance. Topics include demand and supply, price elasticity, consumer choice, and profit maximization, along with accounting principles, financial statement analysis, and business opportunity evaluation.
RCSC 240 Consumer Behavior
Explore consumer behavior and the decision-making processes involved when individuals or groups, select, purchase, use or dispose of products and services to satisfy needs and desires. Discuss consumer behavior theories and practical applications of the concepts to real-world consumption activities.
RCSC 295A Career Exploration
Personal and professional development for RCSC students. This course prepares students to apply for internships and to enter the workforce by providing tools and resources for internship and career success. Topics include personal branding, professional dress, resumes, cover letters, and success factors in interviews and internships.
RCSC 305 Advanced Retail Planning
Real-world industry practices in retail buying, planning, allocation, and control. Forecast customer needs and determine how to maximize profit by utilizing the industry data, analytics, and intuition. This course also covers pricing, inventory planning, negotiation, merchandise promotions, and vendor management.
RCSC 310 Retail Management and Operations
Contemporary concepts, principles, and practices of retail operations management. Real-world cases and perspectives for store, digital, and omnichannel retailing. Topics include operations strategy, process design, capacity planning, inventory control, loss prevention, and project management. The topics are integrated using the retail profit model and a systems model of the operations of a retail organization.
RCSC 315 Retail Communications Strategy
Apply integrated marketing communications (IMC) in the retail environment. Explore the IMC planning process to effectively use advertising, public relations, direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, visual merchandising, and digital/social media. Research, create, organize, and present marketing communication campaigns.
RCSC 316 Retail Business Analysis
Develop competencies essential in retail business analysis. Explore the fundamentals of business analysis and apply analysis techniques in retail situations, including basic financial performance analysis, pro-forma financial projections, business model simulation, sensitivity analysis, and return on investment (ROI) analysis. Particular attention will be given to practical techniques used by business analysts in the retailing industry.
RCSC 316A Retail Business Analysis Lab
Intermediate retail business analysis using Microsoft Excel and other computer applications. Identify, define, assess, and apply business analysis techniques and practice competencies important to retail business analysis, including forecasting, sensitivity analysis, data management, and data visualization. This lab is designed to support the learning objectives and related activities in RCSC 316 Retail Business Analysis.
RCSC 320 Retail Brand Strategy
Brand management within the retailing industry incorporates retailer brand management, owned and private label brands, vertically-integrated brands, and marketing of branded merchandise and services. Explore brand positioning, brand identity, the planning and implementing of brand marketing programs, growing and sustaining brand equity, and the brand issues and challenges commonly faced by retail brand managers and merchants.
RCSC 324 Customer Experience Management
Understanding customers and delivering optimized, personalized experiences can increase customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. This course will cover customer experience (CX) design, testing and evaluation, and management for real-world, digital, and omnichannel shopping environments. Students will use CX consumer research tools including ethnography, video analysis, emotion detection, and digital usability testing (UX) incorporating professional UX applications, eye movement tracking and biometrics. Students will also explore CX management processes including service quality evaluation and management, service blueprinting, customer journey mapping, customer lifecycle model analysis, and customer lifetime value. In this hands-on course, students will learn how to use prototype, develop, and test websites, mobile apps, and store experience concepts for testing and build a CX/UX portfolio.
RCSC 325 Retail Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Creating a new, innovative retailing venture can be both challenging and rewarding. Explore theories and practices of innovation and entrepreneurship in the retailing industry. Learn about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, how to identify new opportunities, the role of innovation, and how to launch and manage the growth of a new retail venture. Students will create and develop an innovative, new retailing concept.
RCSC 346 Fundamentals of Marketing
Marketing principles and practices for the retailing and services sectors. Learn how to manage the marketing mix (product, price, promotion, distribution) to create competitive advantage and deliver value to consumers, firms, and society at large in a semester-long marketing planning project. Discuss some of the opportunities and major challenges marketing managers face.
RCSC 350 Supply Chain Management
Supply chain management is the design and management of seamless, value-added processes across organizational boundaries to meet the real needs of the end customer. With increasing competition around the globe, supply chain management is both a challenge and an opportunity for retailers. Investigate supply chain challenges, including how to cope with demand and supply uncertainty, how to build and optimize the supply chain organization, global perspectives, and optimization of logistics, inventory, and international trade-related costs.
RCSC 360 Digital Retailing
Survey of digital retailing methods and practices for marketing products and services in direct-to-consumer business models. The course will cover website and mobile design, digital authoring and publishing tools, e-commerce business models, electronic merchandising theory, terminology, resources, and practices. Students will learn about digital commerce via applied learning activities and development of a fully functional digital store.
RCSC 361 Social Media, Influencers and Consumers
Social media and digital influencers have a direct effect on consumer decisions, attitudes, and satisfaction. Learn about the role of social media and digital influencers in consumer decision making, brand awareness and associations, and the theory and practices of digital word-of-mouth (WOM). In this hands-on workshop course, students will engage in applied learning activities and digital experiments including developing a socially-native brand, creating a content marketing campaign, building an influencer persona, and designing a social commerce site. Students will use professional authoring tools to create videos and other multimedia content.
RCSC 380 Sustainable Consumption
Examine consumer behavior in the context of global environmental and social challenges. Sustainability requires a critical shift in consumers' mindset to effectively respond to these challenges. We will discuss adaptation and mitigation strategies for consumers with special emphasis on overconsumption as the main driver of climate change, the reduction of individual and collective ecological footprints, the boundaries in effectively adapting materialist lifestyles, and the intersection of economic, ecological and social inequity. The course provides an introduction into environmental and social sustainability, including the science, theoretical concepts, and practical approaches used to analyze and reduce negative impacts of consumer behavior.
RCSC 384 Leadership, Management and Ethics
Explore leadership and management concepts and practices that lead to more effective, ethical and socially-responsible organizations. Build your professional leadership capabilities in organizational planning, business decision making, negotiation and influence, teamwork, employee motivation and training, organizational goal setting, and business communications. Develop skills for managing the challenges and opportunities of diversity and cultural differences within organizations and the global marketplace. Evaluate and reflect on your career path and career development.
RCSC 405 Merchandising Systems
Offering the right mix of products at the right time and place is one of the best ways for retailers to drive sales and build customer loyalty. Learn about advanced merchandise management systems and processes within the context of omnichannel retail enterprises. Students will apply and utilize a retail software system which provides businesses with a quicker and more efficient process for creating and executing retail enterprise plans. By translating customer knowledge, software allows students to practice to develop better corporate merchandising, thereby increasing profitability.
RCSC 415 Retail Store Design, Planning and Display
Explore visual merchandising as retail communication strategy. Learn about concepts, tools, and techniques for retail store design and merchandise display. By participating in creative activities and practical projects, you will practice the visual merchandising process to determine effective visual strategies that improve shopping convenience and customer experiences in sophisticated retail environments.
RCSC 434 Omnichannel and Multichannel Retailing
The integration of physical and digital retail sales channels is transforming how consumers shop and enabling new, innovative go-to-market strategies. Explore how omnichannel and multichannel business models can be used as a differentiator and increase competitiveness of a retailer. Emphasis on digitalization of retailing, channel innovation, and emerging retail technologies.
RCSC 440 Customer Research and Insights
Design, interpret, and apply primary and secondary research techniques used to generate customer insights and guide retailers' decision-making. The course combines textbook learning with real-world examples and applications so that students can engage in consumer research in practice.
RCSC 480 Sustainable Retailing
Examine and develop retailer strategies in response to global environmental and social challenges. Sustainability requires a critical shift in how retail businesses operate, in particular with respect to climate change mitigation and adaptation. The course provides an introduction into the business perspective on environmental and social sustainability, the concept of the circular economy, industry standards, integration of sustainability across the supply chain and customer management, and best practice cases.
RCSC 491 Preceptorship
Specialized work on an individual basis, consisting of instruction and practice in actual service in a department, program, or discipline. Teaching formats may include seminars, in-depth studies, laboratory work and patient study.
RCSC 492 Directed Research
Design and conduct research projects as part of a research team. Gain applied experience in essential components of research work, including for example the theoretical basis of research work, identifying suitable research methods, conducting literature and data base reviews, devising sampling techniques, applying survey or experimental research techniques, transcribing and coding qualitative data, coding quantitative data, data management and basic analysis, developing and presenting research reports, among other activities.
RCSC 493B Retailing and Consumer Science Internship
Specialized work on an individual basis, consisting of training and practice in actual service in a technical, business, or governmental establishment.
RCSC 496A Topics in Retailing and Consumer Science
The development and exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers.
RCSC 498 RCSC Senior Capstone
A culminating experience for majors involving a substantive project that demonstrates a synthesis of learning accumulated in the major, including broadly comprehensive knowledge of the discipline and its methodologies. Senior standing required.
RCSC 498H Honors Thesis
An honors thesis is required of all the students graduating with honors. Students ordinarily sign up for this course as a two-semester sequence. The first semester the student performs research under the supervision of a faculty member; the second semester the student writes an honors thesis.
RCSC 499 Independent Study
Qualified students working on an individual basis with professors who have agreed to supervise such work.