Other forms: retailing, retailed, retails
Retail is selling goods one at a time to the people who will use them. The shop on the high street, the till, the shelf you take a tin off — that end of the chain is retail.
Its opposite is wholesale, selling in bulk to the shops themselves, and the pair mark the two prices: wholesale price and retail price, with the shop's margin sitting between them. Retail works as a noun (a career in retail), as a modifier (retail sales, retail park, retail banking) and as a verb, where a thing retails AT or FOR a price: the jacket retails at eighty-nine pounds. Online selling counts as retail too — e-commerce did not replace the word, it took it over. Retail therapy is the half-joking name for shopping to feel better. Some speakers move the stress between the two parts of speech: the noun is RE-tail, the verb can be re-TAIL.
1nounretailThe business of selling goods in small quantities to the public.
“She has worked in retail since she left school.”
synonyms: shopkeeping
2verbsoldTo be sold, or to sell something, at a stated price to the public.
“The same lamp retails for twice as much in the airport shop.”
retail is a kind of trade.
Retail reached English from the Old French verb retaillier, and the trail stops fairly quickly after that. What the word has always described is the small end of the trade: goods broken out of the bulk and sold one at a time, which is exactly what the shop on the corner does.
From the Old French - verb retaillier.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA