—- **FOR NEW STUDENTS**————————————————

1. 🔊 What industry do you work in and what is your role?
2. 🔊 What are your responsibilities in your role/position?
3. 🔊 Can you describe to me the function of your workplace/company?
4. 🔊 How many departments, how many offices. National or International?
5. 🔊 What is the Minimum requirements for employment i.e Education or Experience?
6. 🔊 How many opportunities are there to ‘move up the ladder’?
7. 🔊 What is the process for changing job roles i.e Interview? Test?

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🔊 General discussion about your workweek:

1. 🔊 Current projects? Deadlines? Opportunities?
2. 🔊 Anything of interest happening?

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Listening

1. 🔊 What company was seen as the Amazon of its time?
2. 🔊 How much did shoppers spend on Cyber Monday?
3. 🔊 Where is e-commerce skyrocketing?

Key Words and Phrases

1. 🔊 There’s nothing quite like the adrenaline rush of a shopping spree. But for many of us, that no longer means walking around shopping malls.It means shopping online.
2. 🔊 That’s one reason why experts are saying we’re in the beginning stages of a retail apocalypse. But are we?
3. 🔊 You’ve probably heard about the challenges brick and mortar stores are facing like Toys R Us, which is closing about 900 of its stores in the U.S. and U.K. And there’s American retail icon Sears.
4. 🔊 It pioneered ordering by catalogue and was seen as the Amazon of its time. Sears had survived for 132 years before it filed for bankruptcy in 2018, closing more than 100 stores.
5. 🔊 It’s not just a few big retailers. In just three years we’ve seen a wave of retailers go bankrupt and in 2017, retail store closures in the United States hit a record high but it’s not just the United States.
6. 🔊 Some places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Britain have also been hit by slow retail sales.
7. 🔊 Almost 6,000 stores closed in Britain last year – that’s 16 stores a day. Those figures may sound like doomsday for retailers, but don’t write them off yet. There’s a silver lining – people love online shopping.
8. 🔊 This year, Cyber Monday became the largest online shopping day in U.S history, with online sales reaching $7.9 billion in one day, while shoppers spent $6.2 billion on Black Friday.
9. 🔊 Still, those figures were eclipsed by those of a one-day shopping event in China. Alibaba’s Singles Day, which falls on November 11, is China’s biggest shopping event. This year, it made a staggering $30.8 billion in 24 hours. China is the largest e-commerce market in the world. The U.S. comes in at number two and the rest of the world makes up about a third of global online sales.
10. 🔊 But how large is the e-commerce market exactly? Well, for all of 2017, American consumers spent a whopping $453 billion online. That sounds like a lot, but Chinese consumers spent more than twice of that, totalling more than $1 trillion. The spectacular e-commerce numbers are the reason why many think physical retail is dying out but let’s take a closer look at the story behind the numbers.
11. 🔊 Online retail sales have been growing as a proportion of total sales in China, as well as in the United States. Globally, there’s a huge appetite for shopping with the click of your mouse. Online sales in Europe are growing 10 times faster than brick and mortar retail, while Southeast Asia’s e-commerce growth is skyrocketing, doubling from 2017 to 2018. But here’s cause for pause.
12. 🔊 The explosive growth of online sales is moderating in China, while it’s keeping steady in the United States. So we may hear about big household names closing a large number of stores, but overall, retail sales in the United States and China continue to grow steadily. Here’s another interesting trend. Online retailers are going from clicks to bricks.
13. 🔊 Amazon, for instance, has opened about 20 bookstores, at least six Amazon Go convenience stores, as well as its 4-star store. You guessed it – it’s a store that only stocks products rated four stars and above on the Amazon website.

Discussion

1. 🔊 For what reasons do people choose to buy online?
2. 🔊 Which products do you already regularly buy online?
3. 🔊 Which industries will struggle to utilise e-commerce?
4. 🔊 What products do you prefer to buy in a physical store / “bricks and mortar shop”
5. 🔊 What impact will these changes have on society in the future?

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