Varying the Variable: Presenting Different Cases for Visualizing the Relative Attractiveness of Retail Business Centers in New Britain, Connecticut

In this paper, the author intends to present a particular methodology for plausibly gauging where the trade or market areas for businesses in retail business zones should be, using standard assumptions about the relationship between the space available for retail activities in those zones and the attractiveness of those zones for the surrounding area's customers. The novelty of the approach presented in this paper, however, will lie in the variations applied to attractiveness assumptions used by the model. ABSTRACT It is common practice in business geography to use gravity models such as the Reilly's Retail Law of Gravitation model to gauge the extent of presumed trade areas for retail sites based on a variable that models the general demographic attractiveness of the site in question. In the Huff retail model, an exponent represents additional attractiveness factors that differentially affect certain sites; however, it is less common practice to vary the attractiveness of one site alone and to visually inspect in a series of maps the differences in other trade areas given the variation of assumptions about the attractiveness of that site. The idea behind this form of analysis is that business managers benefit from being able to visualize a range of possible contingencies to which they may have to respond. The city of New Britain, Connecticut, is used as a demonstration model in this article to provide these kinds of visualization maps.