Abstract

Purpose: It is necessary to look at the reasons why the Korean government has failed in boosting mom and pops, even though many aid programs for independent retailers have been introduced. Furthermore, this research will provide policy makers and practitioners with new insight to improve the performance of government policies. Research design: the researcher has had an interview with the 26 practitioners to gather the right information. Furthermore, interview results have been categorized into the government-related issues, support programs and shop owner-related issues, from a practitioner's perspectives. Results: The researcher found that the confusion of governmental support organization, the lack of retail marketing experts, frequent job rotation, the lack of cooperation between bureaucrats and associations, concerned about the governmental-related issues, are failure reasons. In terms of support program issues, the research found the following reasons: no blueprint, the lack of retail experts, relevance to budget scale, and the complexity of budget implementation. Associated with shop owner-related issues, the author found that the causes of failure are closely related to aging shopkeepers, the absence of a successor and increasing dependence on a government. Conclusions: The author proposes that a government has to rebuild existing support programs for small shop owners.