Recently in retailing Category

Now at streets.mn: Just-in-time consumption: Does the `pint of milk test’ hold water?:

"As with stores, houses too are getting larger over the long run. New suburban homes have more space to store goods in-house. While urban residents export storage to common stores, suburban residents more likely to have second freezers, have more space to store stuff."

This is an update from a post first published in 2007.

Now @ streets.mn: 2012 Best Mid-Late 20th Century Enclosed Shopping Mall: Mall of America:

"What do most urbanists want? A lively, pedestrian realm, clean, free of automobiles, with a variety of activities, the ability to interact with others and randomly encounter friends and acquaintances. This is what the shopping mall gives."

PiPress: Mall of America plans $200 million expansion:

"that would add a second hotel, more retail space and a medical office tower at the megamall."

Strib: $100 million in flour power to transform Pillsbury A-Mill :

"Now, a robust rental market and an ambitious plan from a local developer could mean new life for the site. Dominium Co. plans to convert the complex into 255 rental apartments for low-income artists, including studios and performance spaces. The project will cost more than $100 million, making it one of the most expensive residential construction projects on the books in the Twin Cities."

[Maybe I misunderstand something, but why are we spending $392,000 per unit for low-income artists. Surely we can spend less to support low-income artists. It's not like we think low-income artists will pay $392K per unit, or will rent it for $4K per month. That is more expensive than my house. Low-income artists, like low-income non-artists, should be able to rent used housing in regular neighborhoods or industrial areas. I am suspicious that one can create an artists district, rather than having one emerge (as happened in NE Mpls or along University Avenue before the LRT priced the artists out). It's not like the preservation of the skin of the building somehow enhances the Twin Cities skyline. This is pseudo-presevationism at its worst.]

Reason supports privatizing the post, that is no surprise, but they dug up this "As Lysander Spooner, who challenged the government mail monopoly when he formed the American Letter Mail Company in 1844 noted in his essay, "The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress, Prohibiting Private Mails,":

Universal experience attests that government establishments cannot keep pace with private enterprize in matters of business (and the transmission of letters is a mere matter of business.) . . . [Private enterprise] is constantly increasing its speed, and simplifying and cheapening its operations. But government functionaries, secure in the enjoyment of warm nests, large salaries, official honors and power, and presidential smiles . . . feel few quickening impulses to labor, and are altogether too independent and dignified personages to move at the speed that commercial interests require. . . . The consequence is, as we now see, that when a cumbrous, clumsy, expensive and dilatory government system is once established, it is nearly impossible to modify or materially improve it. Opening the business to rivalry and free competition, is the only way to get rid of the nuisance.

Lysander Spooner is one of those great Americans about whom you should read the wikipedia article. E.g. he was an ardent abolitionist who supported the right of the South to secede.

HuffPo: Tacocopter Aims To Deliver Tacos Using Unmanned Drone Helicopters:

"Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane!

It's an unmanned drone helicopter shooting a taco from space down at you and your colleagues during lunchtime!"

Holian and Kahn: The Impact of Center City Economic and Cultural Vibrancy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transportation. ... "vibrant downtown areas are associated with lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from driving, and with greater public transit use."

We update Glaeser and Shaprio’s analysis using data from the 2000s. Unfortunately, the results do not bode well for dense cities, and by extension, the environment. While New York City grew by a little more than two percent, the population of Chicago fell by seven percent. We investigate the growth rates in over 1,000 cities in Section 1, and find that although density was not as bad for growth as it was in the 1980s, it was worse for growth than in the 1990s. Our results indicate that dense cities have quite a long way to go before we can say they are “back.”

...

When including our vibrancy measures, we find that downtowns with more hotels and more restaurants per capita are also associated with less driving.

...

Our findings with respect to the vibrancy-public transit connection show that places that have an educated downtown population, a low murder growth rate, and a high number of live-music performers are associated with higher public transit use.

Alexis Madrigal @ The Atlantic: Guess What's the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years:

"When we think about the great consumer electronics technologies of our time, the cellular phone probably springs to mind. If we go farther back, perhaps we'd pick the color television or the digital camera. But none of those products were adopted as fast by the American people as the boom box. "

Metafilter: Traffic jams without bottlenecks—experimental evidence for the physical mechanism of the formation of a jam :

"The mathematical theory behind shockwave traffic jams was developed more than 20 years ago using models that show jams appearing from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic - typically triggered by a single driver slowing down. After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, traveling backwards through the traffic."

Some of our research will be presented live on the Internet at the Techplan Roundtable on August 19 (tomorrow) starting at 8:45 CDT

We are on about 11:30 with "CONSUMER TRAVEL BEHAVIOR AND RETAIL GEOGRAPHY: A MICROSCOPIC INVESTIGATION USING GPS DATA AND PARCEL-LEVEL LAND USE." Arthur will do most of the talking.

Working paper:

• Huang, Arthur and Levinson, David (2011) Accessibility, network structure, and consumers’ destination choice: a GIS analysis of GPS travel data.

  Anecdotal and empirical evidence has shown that road networks, destination accessibility, and travelers' choice of destination are closely related. Nevertheless, there have not been systematic investigations linking individuals' travel behavior and retail clusters at the microscopic level. Based on GPS travel data in the Twin Cities, this paper analyzes the impacts of travelers' interactions with road network structure and clustering of services at the destination on travelers' destination choice. A multinomial logit model is adopted. The results reveal that higher accessibility and diversity of services in adjacent zones of a destination are associated with greater attractiveness of a destination. Further, the diversity and accessibility of establishments in an area are often highly correlated. In terms of network structure, a destination with a more circuitous or discontinuous route dampens its appeal. Answering where and why people choose to patronize certain places, our planning, our findings shed light on the design of road networks and clusters from a travel behavior perspective.

  (working paper)

Some nuance on language.

Shop: wiktionary: From Middle English shoppe, from Old English sceoppa (“booth”)

1. An establishment that sells goods or services to the public; originally a physical location, but now a virtual establishment as well.
2. A place where things are crafted; a workshop or hobbyshop.
3. An automobile mechanic's workplace.
4. Workplace; office. Used mainly in expressions such as shop talk, closed shop and shop floor.

Store: wiktionary:  Etymology from Latin instaurare - (“erect, establish”). store

1. A place where items may be accumulated or routinely kept.
2. A supply held in storage.
3. (mainly North American) A place where items may be purchased.

A shop is a place where things are worked on (and sold), a store is a place where things are kept (and sold). We go shopping but we don't go storing, we come home and store the things we got from the larger store.

The idea of a store, where things that we may need are stored and distributed, is ultimately one of sharing community resources. I may need tools at some point, but rather than own all the tools I might need, there is a hardware store which sells things on a just-in-time basis to consumers. Who owns the hardware store (an individual, a firm, a cooperative) is secondary to the necessity of such a function to achieve economies of scale and ensure variety. If there were no stores, we would need to store everything we might need, and would need to truck and barter for goods with their makers, a much less efficiency system.

The idea of a shop is just the place where the trade takes place. Implicitly, a store holds lots of things, a shop is just a place for the transaction or some local repair work. This is somewhat lost in modern usage, but we still have hardware stores and grocery stores (which are relatively large), but dress shops, tailor shops, auto shops (which at least the first two are relatively small, and the latter two refer to where things are done rather than already made things are sold).

Both of these functions are necessary in urban systems. We  need both places to store items we may need in the future (and then acquire them when needed), and we need shop-places to work on things, making them, repairing them, altering them.  With the move toward a disposable society, where it costs more to fix things (which is a laborious process) than make them (which is often automated), the share of space devoted to shops rather than stores has declined. Proposition Joe is in a declining business (“Shine that up and put $7.50 on it… Shame to let a good toaster go to waste over a frayed cord” - Proposition Joe, The Wire)

Where these things are located relative to where people and live and work depends on the frequency of use. We want things we want frequently (e.g. milk), to be closer than things we want infrequently (e.g. furniture). But closer and farther are relative not absolute terms. They depend on context: location with respect to others (density or community demand), the cost of travel (technology), frequency of use (individual demand), and so on. Relative locations have changed over time as density, technology, and demand have changed.

See also: Just-in-time consumption: Does the `pint of milk test' hold water?

Recently published:

Huang, Arthur and David Levinson (2011) Why retailers cluster: an agent model of location choice on supply chains volume 38(1) pages 82 - 94. [download from Environment and Planning b website]

Abstract. This paper investigates the emergence of retail clusters on supply chains comprised of suppliers, retailers, and consumers. An agent-based model is employed to study retail location choice in a market of homogeneous goods and a market of complementary goods. On a circle comprised of discrete locales, retailers play a noncooperative game by choosing locales to maximize profits which are impacted by their distance to consumers and to suppliers. Our findings disclose that in a market of homogeneous products symmetric distributions of retail clusters arise out of competition between individual retailers; average cluster density and cluster size change dynamically as retailers enter the market. In a market of two complementary goods, multiple equilibria of retail distributions are found to be common; a single cluster of retailers has the highest probability to emerge. Overall, our results show that retail clusters emerge from the balance between retailers' proximity to their customers, their competitors, their complements, and their suppliers.

The software underlying this paper, CLUSTER, has just been made available on the STREET website, so you are free to test and reproduce the results yourself. The software is free and open source, so feel free to modify, please let us know if you do anything.

Parking Lots Help Predict Earnings: ""

UBS Investment Research has started incorporating analysis of satellite images of the parking lots of big-box retailers into its earnings estimates, reports CNBC, forecasting an uptick in sales based on parking lot traffic where a drop was previously expected.

Design Observer discusses All Those Numbers: Logistics, Territory and Walmart describing Wal-Mart's spread across the US, and the underlying logistics driving it. The total footprint of Wal-Mart's US stores is larger than Manhattan.