The art and science of retail location decisions

Although formal techniques of locational analysis have been available for over 50 years, most retailers traditionally made no use of them, relying instead on intuition guided by experience and “common sense”. However, the simultaneous advent in the last 15 years of low cost computing and the increasing availability of retail related data of all types has given retailers the opportunity to take a much more rational approach to decision making. This paper examines the extent to which retailers have taken advantage of the potential released by these developments, and adopted more “scientific” rules based methodologies. The analysis is based on an extensive questionnaire survey of UK retailers conducted in 1998 which encompassed organisations operating altogether more than 50,000 outlets across eight sectors. The survey sought to identify the use made both of particular types of techniques, and of Geographical Information Systems, which act as a platform for them. It was complemented by a series of in‐depth interviews with location specialists in a number of major retail organisations.