Identifying seasonal variations in store‐level visitor grocery demand

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the contribution of visitor demand to the seasonal sales variations experienced at grocery retailers in Cornwall, South West England. Design/methodology/approach – Working collaboratively with a major UK retailer provides access to store trading information and customer data from a popular loyalty card scheme. The authors use spatial analysis to identify revenue originating from outside the store catchment, and explore the spatial and temporal nature of the visitor demand recorded in‐store. Findings – The paper demonstrates the significant degree of seasonality experienced around stores in terms of their revenue generated from out‐of‐catchment visitors, and highlights implications for store location planning. Most notably, visitor expenditure tends to demonstrate far more spatial and temporal clustering than residential demand. The authors argue that it is essential for retailers to ensure that their location planning makes full use of all available consumer data to understand the local nature of demand, including the impact of visitor expenditure. Research limitations/implications – The authors aim to use this insight to develop a spatial decision support system (SDSS) for use within site location planning in the retail sector. This would incorporate a spatial interaction model to estimate and account for variation in local demand generated by seasonal tourist visits. Originality/value – Customer level loyalty card data are rarely available for academic investigations and the authors are able to provide a unique insight into customer expenditure in tourist locations. There has been little exploration of seasonal tourist demand in store location planning, and this study addresses an identified academic and commercial need.