The locational structure of groceries retailing in Hobart and the study of retail location

Since World War Two, a feature of the economic growth of advanced Western nations has been the rapidly-increasing importance of the tertiary sector, which includes retailing. In Australia, for example, the percentage of the national workforce employed in the supply of tertiary goods and services has risen from 54.8 to 60.1; the percentage of G.N.P. contributed by the tertiary sector has risen from 45.9 to 53.2. In Australia too, the greatest contribution to the growth of the tertiary sector was made by retailing, which between 1954 and 1961 contributed 19% of the increase in employment in the 27 tertiary industries. The Vernon Committee of Economic Enquiry attributes these trends not primarily to rapid increases in population and personal disposable incomes, but to the increasing demands for a complex superstructure of tertiary goods and services which arise with the continued growth of an already highly-developed economy. The supply of tertiary goods and services has been increasingly concentrated in major metropolitan areas. In Australia, this has occurred at an even faster rate than that of the centralisation of the nation' s population in the state capitals. It has resulted in a noticable increase in the demand for urban land especially for transportation and retail and office uses, in competition with the demands for land for residential, manufacturing and other uses. In particular, over the last ten to fifteen years, the proliferation of large planned and unplanned shopping and office centres, and of large-scale retail establishments and multi-establishment retail firms, has been on of the most spectacular developments in Western economies. The 'correct' selection, prediction and control of the locations of retail establishments - and particularly of the locations of retail establishments within metropolitan areas - have accordingly become important questions. For the executives of retail firms, location decisions seem to have become as important as decisions about price ,service, product variety and advertising in determining the success of the firm in cutthroat competition with others in rapidly growing markets. For authorities in the public sector, questions concerning the quantity and position of land to be allocated to different sizes and types of shopping centre, in preference to alternative uses, raise significant social welfare problems. Not only do these problems include, for example, the obvious general one of weighing the relative social costs and benefits of having larger, more centralised, as against smaller, more dispersed retail establishments. They also include such particular problems as the effects on the prices of goods sold and on the ranges of goods available for consumer choice of planned retail developments of different size and location. One key to the selection, prediction and control of the locations of retail establishments seems to be in the development of a theory of retail location which will help identify all the important variables which affect the profitability of retail outlets in different locations, and the precise ways in which these variables operate. This thesis is designed as a contribution to the development of such a theory. In Chapter one, the deficiencies of existing theories were mentioned, and two new hypotheses are framed to account for the locations of retail establishments. In the remainder of the thesis, the hypotheses are tested using data for the sample of retail establishments comprising the Hobart groceries trade in 1964. The framing and testing of the two hypotheses are designed to pave the way towards the improved explanation, prediction and control of the locations of retail establishments.