In the article presented, the authors analyze the current state of the retail market inRussia both in general and in its largest megacities: St. Petersburg and Moscow, estimate the consequences of its inclusion into the globalization process and attempt to determine its type. The area of academic expertise of the authors of this article has since a long time included the study of the specifics and the determination of types of the consumer markets. The disastrous state of the consumer market was one of the reasons for the breakup of the USSR in 1991,
while the filling of the consumer market with the food products became the first, though rather painful due to the dramatic increase of prices, result of Russian transition to the market economy. Within a short time, the imported goods, virtually unseen before, including the production of the well-known global manufacturers, appeared on the Russian market. Though not all of the import products delivered to Russia at that time were of acceptable quality, the
process of Russian entry into the global consumer markets has definitely started. Within the article, we used the certain criteria to choose the main retail chains, dominating the retail markets of St. Petersburg and Moscow. We also established that these markets do not represent a single whole and that, in order to successfully reach our goal and determine its type, it is necessary to start with dividing the markets into segments. The next stage of our study allowed
us to make some conclusions about the competitive pattern and domination in these markets