Grocery
Grocery-anchored retail, the format that has held up best. Includes leakage analysis and format matching.
What it weighs most
Population within a 10-minute drive
22% of the score. The rest is on this page.
01 / The problem
Grocery is the most resilient format in retail and the least forgiving. Match the wrong format to the income and the store is dead before the doors open, whatever the population count said.
02 / The decisions it serves
Not a report. A decision somebody has to sign.
Each of these is a question your team already asks, and currently answers with a spreadsheet, a phone call and a fortnight.
Which format this trade area can carry
Conventional, specialty, hard discount or ethnic. The population and the income decide, and they decide narrowly.
Whether the market is already oversupplied
Square feet of grocery per person is the number that settles it. Under twelve is underserved. Over twenty and you are fighting for scraps.
Whether there is leakage worth capturing
Demand minus supply, as a real figure rather than a hunch about an underserved neighbourhood.
Whether a supercentre is about to eat it
One within three miles takes a quarter to a third of the grocery spend in the area.
03 / The method, in the open
Here is exactly what it weighs. Argue with it.
Most tools will not show you this, because most tools do not have it. These are the weights the playbook really uses.
Population within a 10-minute drive
Grocery spending per capita
Spending potential index over 110 is strong
Competitive grocery density
Grocery square feet per person
Traffic count
Median household income
Visibility and access
Parking ratio
Co-tenancy potential
04 / It is willing to say no
It does not hand you numbers. It gives you a verdict.
An assistant that only ever agrees with you is a mirror, not an analyst. This one holds a line, names the thing that kills the deal, and will tell you to walk away from a site you already like.
The thresholds it holds you to
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Population within 10 minutes: over 40,000 for a conventional store, 25,000 for specialty, 15,000 for hard discount.
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Grocery square feet per capita: under 12 is underserved, over 20 is saturated.
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Median income: $55K and up for conventional, $80K for specialty, $35K for discount.
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Traffic over 20,000 vehicles a day on the primary road.
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Five to six parking spaces per 1,000 square feet.
What it will not let you ignore
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Grocery square feet per capita above 20 in the trade area, which means oversupplied.
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A Walmart Supercenter within three miles, which captures 25 to 35% of grocery spending.
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Population declining in the trade area.
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No anchor-capable pad available, and grocery needs four to six acres.
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Median income misaligned with the format: a discount store in an affluent area, or the reverse.
05 / Why not just ask an AI
A fluent answer and a defensible one are not the same thing.
Every model will answer a location question now, and most of the answers sound right. Ask twice and you get two of them. Ask where the number came from and the room goes quiet.
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It computes grocery square feet per capita in the trade area rather than eyeballing how many stores are on the map.
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It matches format to income as a hard gate. A discount box in an affluent market and a specialty store in a value one fail for the same reason.
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It knows a grocery anchor needs four to six acres, so it will tell you the trade area works and the pad does not.
06 / What it runs on, and what you get
The data underneath
Licensed and authoritative, and named in the output, so the number keeps its source when it travels.
- Esri GeoEnrichment
- Spending potential index
- Census
- Traffic counts
What you walk out with
A scored assessment against every factor above, on the live map, with the method beside it.
The method it used and the vintage of every number travel with it, so it still holds up when somebody asks you why in six months.
How an answer travels07 / It pairs with
Nobody makes one decision in isolation. Most teams run this alongside two or three of these.
Run Grocery on something you already decided. See if it agrees with you.
The honest test of a method is whether it reaches the conclusion your best analyst already reached, and tells you plainly when it does not.
Twenty minutes, and you can argue with the weights.