US Retail Centers

Our ShopPoint database of Retail Clusters offers the first, comprehensive look at the retail environment in the United States, available now for planning and decision-making.

First a few definitions so that retail clusters, retail areas and “bricks” or retail grid cells don’t begin to sound all the same.

Let’s look at the facts about centers and retail areas. The current commercial databases listing centers and malls have between 5,000 and 50,000 entries. These data typically represent all of the larger shopping centers in the United States and many mid-sized centers. If you are looking for major retailers in the US, quite a few can be found in these centers; however, there are some “catches” here --- and they are big ones.

1. Many retailers today (major and minor) are not located in shopping centers of any scale but rather appear as freestanding businesses in retail “strips,” clusters, or small strip centers.

2. Many shopping centers, especially strip centers of 3-10 stores, don't appear in any database.

How important are these retail clusters and small strip centers? If you are The Gap, Sears or Nieman Marcus, perhaps not very important. However, roughly 80% of all retail activity takes place in these areas outside of the traditional centers and malls. Hundreds of major retailers such as chain restaurants, convenience stores, pharmacies, and many others are likely to be found here. Also, in today’s competitive retail environment, with limited development of new centers, many traditional center-based retailers are opening stores here.

Our research of all shopping areas in the United States shows that retail activity takes place in:

• 5,000 “very large” malls and shopping centers (with 225,000+ square feet)
• 15,000 large centers ranging from 100,000 to 225,000 square feet)
• 40,000 medium-sized or local centers ranging from 30,000 to 100,000 square feet.
• 700,000+ retail clusters consisting of smaller strip centers, retail corridors and retail areas ranging from moderately busy commercial areas with 25-50 retail businesses per square mile to neighborhood areas with fewer than 20 retail businesses per square mile.

While the traditional shopping center databases may serve many retailers well, most retailers today need to understand and have access to the entire retail landscape, including all retail areas, recognizing that many of today’s “retail areas” will evolve into tomorrow’s shopping centers. Our comprehensive database of approximate retail areas is called the ShopPoint™ database.

When you are looking at city, such as Dallas, how do you select a set of retail bricks or grid cells to define a Retail Cluster of interest?

You have two options here:

• You can use one of our predefined Retail Clusters. In many situations the collection of grid cells that defines a retail cluster is fairly obvious and we have attempted to predefine most major retail clusters. This is especially true when a grid cell contains one or more shopping centers and has less dense cells surrounding it. This would define a “classic” retail cluster.
• You can define your own Retail Cluster. In other situations you will want to create your own Retail Cluster based on your local knowledge of the market. The program allows you to do this by simply clicking on the individual retail bricks or grid cells of interest and aggregating them into a custom Retail Cluster. This approach is especially valuable in larger markets where the retail landscape is continuous in busy areas and the breaks between clusters are not obvious.

A shopping center is a discrete place, a point on a map that has stores and parking places and streets associated with it. What does a “retail area” mean? How do you know when to “start” and “stop” it? Don’t retail areas overlap a great deal?

A Retail Cluster or Retail Area is nothing more than a collection of smaller areas containing shopping centers and out parcels, commercial strips with freestanding retailers and smaller strip centers, business/retail/housing mixes and other retail formats. Because such clusters vary enormously in density and size, it is convenient to define them using a smaller grid cell or “brick” as the basic unit. To keep the numbers from getting unwieldy we have selected a brick that is approximately one square kilometer in size --- as the basic unit. Retail clusters then range in size from a single brick to a maximum of 25 bricks. Very dense retail areas might actually have larger clusters but we’ve limited the size of our pre-defined clusters to 25 bricks to protect the “sense of place” associated with each cluster, allowing you to connect the cluster to a surrounding trade area and other geographic features. In creating your custom clusters you can make them as large as you like.