Study: Houston ranks low in indie retail

Dallas ranked lower

Marci Gilbert, Feb 21, 11.

The American Booksellers Association recently commissioned a nationwide study of the economics of independent retailers to measure where retail powerhouses are found, according to the report released by Civic Economics, who created the study. Houston was ranked low in comparison to cities of its size for independent retail strength, but Dallas ranked even lower.

The study used the Indie City Index to show which city’s retail does best and provide a baseline for future research. Because no single dataset quantifies independent retail sales, the study used the following method to identify strong retail sectors:

We chose to come at the question looking at sales of major chain stores in each market. The idea is that by identifying a substantial portion of retail sales in each market attributable to the major chains, we would develop a gauge of chain store saturation. The flip side of that gauge, then, provides a strong indication of the relative market share of local, independent retailers.

The Indie City Index assigns a score to each of the 363 Metropolitan Areas of the nation based on 120,000 retail locations of large and small companies. Higher scores indicate relatively healthier independent retail sectors as indicated by the relatively lower concentration of major chain stores.

Index scores are presented in three groups: top and bottom overall by index score; top ten by population group; and top ten by region. That is followed by a list of communities that outperform their peers in both population and regional categories.

In the overall population category, Houston ranked low compared to other cities with a rank of 162, but Dallas was far worse ranked 328 of 363. In the category of city populations over 3 million, Houston ranked 17th of 20 and Dallas ranked 20th.

The overall best city for independent retail development is Ocean City, NJ according to the study, and the overall worst city is Kankakee-Bradley, IL. In the population over 3 million category, the best city for retail is the New York/Long Island/New Jersey area.

Full listings of the Index by rank order, alphabetical order, region, and population group can be found in the Data Appendix.

Source: Civic Economics