Lisa Hill, territorial business manager of the Emporia Buxton study, gives a presentation on the report done for the city.
Buxton’s retail development study of Emporia is complete, and the city has a list of retailers to target. For right now, no one outside city leadership is going to know which retailers those are.
Lisa Hill, Buxton’s territorial business manager for the Emporia study, finally made her twice-rescheduled presentation to a large group of community leaders Friday afternoon at the Lee Beran Recreation Center. Hill explained the customer analytics firm’s process of using psychographics — which categorizes people based on their purchasing habits — to identify where Emporia’s retail potential is, and which retailers might be interested in setting up shop here.
Buxton purchases recorded information of what people in the area are buying — such as credit card and grocery store card information and television viewing data — to analyze what Hill called “a profile, or a DNA strand of your community.” Hill said all U.S. households fall into one of 66 psychographic segments; Buxton’s work finds out which segments are the most dominant in Emporia. The study also used demand and supply numbers to measure Emporia’s retail “leakage” — the difference between consumer demand and supply for various retail categories.
After compiling the results and making retail matches, Buxton provided city leaders with a list of about 60 retailers for potential recruitment. Regional Development Association of East Central Kansas President Kent Heermann said he and three other city leaders — City Manager Matt Zimmerman, Chamber of Commerce President Jeanine McKenna, and Emporia Main Street Director Kayla Oney — narrowed the list down to a top 20.
Hill said the list of retailers Buxton provided the city needed to be kept private.
“That’s a list that you don’t want to share,” she said, “because the other cities that you’re competing with may go after (those retailers) without actually paying for the information that this city paid for.”
Heermann added that he didn’t want to reveal the retailers on the top 20 list because he didn’t want people to automatically assume that those retailers would be coming here.
“I’m sure that information will get out eventually,” he said. “There are... some restaurants, some clothing retailers. Some of the bigger boxes weren’t identified as matches for us. That doesn’t mean they won’t necessarily look at us.”
Buxton found sizeable retail leakage in such areas as the “food service/drinking places” category, with an overall annual difference between demand and supply of $6,018,534, and the “furniture/home furnishings” group, with an annual leakage of $5,836,370. That means, for example, that consumers in the area are spending $5.8 million on the furniture/home furnishings category outside Emporia’s trade area.
The report lists a total retail leakage of $11,484,230.
One of the questions asked of Hill during the presentation’s question-and-answer session was whether the Tyson plant layoffs, with thousands of people who would have been part of Buxton’s consumer data potentially leaving the community, affected the results of the study. Hill said the impact wasn’t significant.
“It did have an impact, but it wasn’t a high enough number of customers to affect our segmentation,” she said after the presentation. “In other words, just because that group of people are no longer shopping and dining in the community doesn’t mean that you don’t have people that are shopping and dining in the community. And so, instead of focusing on what wasn’t here, we focused on what was here, and what is sustainable here.”
Hill said Buxton’s “lifetime partnership” with the city means that if city leaders want the study redone, or “refreshed,” in one to two years, Buxton will do so.
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Posted by admireed (anonymous) on April 5, 2008 at 5 p.m. (Suggest removal)
If I were an area retailer I would be interested to know what businesses the "Ins" wish to bring to town to compete with me. My tax money paid, in part, for this study and tax monies will help bring them here to run me out. What a place!
Posted by gazette_reader (anonymous) on April 5, 2008 at 8:01 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I think I would only be worried as a retailer if I were already offering goods and services in an area that was identified as leakage. And then I'd want to know about the leakage. I think there's more to it then just whether or not something is available in Emporia.
Consider the furniture "leakage." We have a few substantial furnitures in town. The problem isn't entirely that Emporia doesn't have decent furniture for sale - it's the fact that when I wanted to buy a refrigerator recommended by Consumer Reports, it would cost me $1,400 here - and I was able to get it at Lowe's for $745. A difference of $655 was well worth the trip to Topeka.
Since this is supposedly a psychological analysis of Emporia's spending habits, I really hope that the report includes the reasons why people buy elsewhere are part of it.
Posted by USNretired (anonymous) on April 5, 2008 at 8:48 p.m. (Suggest removal)
This report should be published as it was compiled at taxpayer's expense. When and where will it be available?
Posted by slipandslide (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 9:21 a.m. (Suggest removal)
dont sound like emporia is the captive market ive heard it described as
Posted by railroadhorn (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 11:31 a.m. (Suggest removal)
I think I'm going downtown on Monday to file a Freedom of Information Act request for this report. No way is it protected. I can't believe they want to hide the most important info that my taxes paid for!!!!
Posted by admireed (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 12:33 p.m. (Suggest removal)
$1400 to $745. Are you sure it was the exact same model?
Posted by gazette_reader (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 12:44 p.m. (Suggest removal)
admireed, I am indeed sure, because we brought in our copy of Consumer Reports and double-checked the model number. My spouse and I even asked Guions if they could come close to matching the price (we were willing to spend up to $250 more for the convenience of staying in town and having someone local to call if something went wrong with it), and we were told that it just wasn't possible for them to sell us that refrigerator for less than $1,400.
Posted by emporian (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 1:12 p.m. (Suggest removal)
There is a huge price difference if you shop around. Everything we furnished our house with came from out of town. We got everything for what guions wanted for a couch and recliner and that includes a sidexside refrigerator/freezer combo with water/ice in the door.
Heck the Furniture Loft in Osage City is cheaper than shopping here. My parents have bought all of there furniture as of late by making a short drive to Osage City, so you cant tell me that the furniture stores in Emporia can't remain competitive because they are too small.
Posted by gazette_reader (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 2:17 p.m. (Suggest removal)
To be fair, we got a good price on our new washer at Hill's.
I, too, would like to see this report. Not just because the taxpayers paid for it, but because it's really hard to hold the city accountable for doing anything useful with it if we have no idea what's in it.
Posted by admireed (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 2:59 p.m. (Suggest removal)
gazetter....thanks for the response. You convinced me.
Yes, the report should be made public. If it needs to be private. Pay for it privately
Posted by ksnewsie (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 7:47 p.m. (Suggest removal)
If the document is presented to the city commission in an open meeting, then it is an open record subject to the Kansas Open Records Law.
Personally, I would like to know what is the need to keep it secret, even if for a little while. Seems to me identifying the "leakage" would help us plug the leak.
And for the record, we bount a dishwasher at Guions. IT would have been $250 less had we bought it at Lowes. We believe in shopping locally, but sometimes the merchants don't make that easy.
Posted by admireed (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 9:37 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Publish it (if they want to) If it is paid for by taxes info should be available to all.
Posted by momus (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 10:02 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Why does it matter who sees the report? The businesses that are a "match" for Emporia probably are not a "match" for any other community in our trade area, so who are we hiding the information from? Is Lebo going to try and steal our chain furniture store, that one can only assume the RDA is recruiting? I mean ITS A CHAIN. By a chains very definition, they posses more than one store in their inventory. And, if a chain is looking for expansion opportunities into Kansas, I highly doubt that they will stop with only one community if they think Emporia is an acceptable fit. Either the quote in the article considering the secretive nature of the twenty businesses "selected" is from an individual that doesn't have a strong grasp of how retail chain placement works, or they are simply trying to avoid controversy. Either way, this course of action is problematic. Not only are existing businesses funding this "study" (I use that term VERY loosely) but I strongly suspect that they will be asked to soon fund incentive packages to bring their competition to town while being blinded to the identity of said competition. It's like the practice in the old Soviet Union where the government would shoot a political dissident and then charge the family for the bullets. Insult to injury.
Speaking of insult to injury, I did some after market research concerning the Buxton Group. I'm not sure how many people here are aware of the numerous companies in the U.S. that do retail matching. I found one recently called Retail Lease Track that also provides retail tracking information, analytics, matching and contact information. The biggest difference I found was price. Retail Lease Track ( http://www.rltrac.com/ ) costs roughly $800 per year, or roughly $69,200 less than we spent on Buxton. We did bid this thing out, right?
And, as we are discussing the leakage data, let us remember the quality of the information we received from this "study". The data is prior to the closing of the Tyson slaughter side. No retail business in their right mind is going to trust those numbers, but with our "continuing relationship" we have the right to purchase another "study" from Buxton down the road. Yippee!
Posted by hottopics (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 10:04 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Well I didnt need to have someone come and tell us how much we shop out of town. I would rather shop elsewhere because its slim pickings here but mostly because I dont receive the customer-merchant appreciation here. This town used to be about one on one. You rarely get that anymore. When I find someone that goes the extra mile I am reminded of what we have lost in the society. So many forget that the customer can and will go somewhere else if you dont take care of them.
And we desperately need more industry to go along with it in order to support the stores and the Mom and Pops here. Minimum wage jobs do not support our community. It doesnt support one person.
I would like to see the City pull it out and actually do something about it, not just talk about it.
Posted by gazette_reader (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 10:15 p.m. (Suggest removal)
hottopics, you are quite right about minimum wage jobs not supporting our community. You can bring in retail, but if that's also the only source of new jobs, there won't be anyone who can actually afford to shop. $7.25-$9 per hour just doesn't go that far.
Posted by momus (anonymous) on April 6, 2008 at 10:36 p.m. (Suggest removal)
The report is a mixed bag in its current form. Assuming a retail sales level of about $268 Million, our pull factor is about .96 which is much higher than many government officials have stated in the past few months. Furthermore, there are other factors not accounted for in leakage (which is why many analysts are calling pull factors an archaic statistic). Pull factors do not account for internet sales, catalogue sales, the lovely revolving door businesses that fail to accurately record sales tax and/or mis-categorized sales. For example, if you were to buy a piece of furniture from Staples, it wouldn't be categorized as furniture in a report like Buxton's (it would be called an office supply).
If the city pulls a report they don't understand, with statistics that they don't understand and preconceptions that are false, they can cause more damage than if they did nothing at all. For information on how the city CAN move forward in a positive manner, I suggest everyone visit: http://www.sustainable.org/ specifically the smart growth section. If you read the smart growth philosophy, it encourages population density, strengthening existing infrastructure, historical preservation, building community and the tax base. Several communities both smaller and larger than Emporia are employing the model with fantastic results. Right now, we are doing almost the exact opposite of most of the tenants of Smart Growth. So if the Smart Growth model is smart, and we are doing the exact opposite...
Posted by create (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 8:15 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Okay, so the city wants to keep the list of suggested retailers private. We wouldn't want Cottonwood Falls to jump out there and build a big box store. Whatever. But, what about the info on the spending habits of Emporia shoppers? Is that privileged information too?
For the record, I bought my side by side fridge with water and ice in the door at Hill's when they were moving from downtown. They offered me a great price and I was very happy with their service.
Posted by momus (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 9 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Create,
The information from Buxton isn't so much spending habits as "categories" of shoppers. Even with that information, it's difficult to get an accurate picture of the shopping habits of Emporians. Buxton buys credit card/debit card information from larger retailers and uses macros to isolate a specific zip code (or codes) of shoppers to develop a profile. Then, those profiles are broken up, using another code, to segment shoppers into predefined categories. They can tell you our biggest category or categories, and they can give you some neat little assumptions about people in those categories, but without actually asking questions to the people of Emporia it's hard to pin down spending habits.
Furthermore, if you shop at an independent or chain that does not compile or sell the type of information Buxton uses, your information isn't counted. If you use a method of payment besides a credit/debit card your information isn't counted. So, I guess I'm saying that they can't give you what they don't really have. One of our biggest categories is called "Mobility Blues" if that helps at all. The actual categories and their descriptions should be at the city, chamber, RDA & Main Street. If you are interested in viewing the category information you may want to contact one or all of those groups.
Posted by create (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 9:29 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Thanks momus, what you say makes a lot of sense. Yes, I see what you mean with regard to specific spending habits. I myself shop online for some things. For example, Amazon doesn't just sell books. It would be interesting to find out what percentage of Emporians do shop online. Thank you.
Posted by netloafer (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 9:44 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Momus
I don't have the firmest of grasps on the pull factor concept. Does it mean that if our pull factor is actually .96 that we're losing far less business to Topeka, etc than previously assumed and that there really isn't a lot of interest on the part of large retailers to come here and that factors like high poverty rates, low household incomes, high property taxes, a lot of sub-standard housing stock, etc are the real culprits when it comes to or inability to develop our community.
My wife and I bought a loft in the River Market area of Kansas city about three years ago. Kansas City saw the need to re-develop that part of town and started by offering tax abatements to people who would by homes in the area, based on the idea that retailers and business come to where the people, money, municipal interest, and opportunity converge. The boom started and now retailers are moving in. In the three years we've seen a couple of Chinese restaurants, a small shop specializing in supplies for lofts (electrical, etc), two or three law firms, and so forth. Once the people moved in the city also began to restore infrastructure. Right now they're in the process of developing a river walk, with treed boulevards. The plan is then to make room for more shops and small businesses as more people move in. It seems like it's working. The value of our initial investment has nearly doubled, retailers are profiting, the neighborhood is being revitalized, and the future prospects for the city's economic future are improving dramatically. I'd appreciate your insights on this. Could something like this work for Emporia or are we too far gone down the wrong path?
Posted by momus (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 10 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Netloafer,
Great questions... Pull factor is the standard the city of Emporia has used to determine the ratio of individuals within our trade area that are shopping in Emporia. A pull factor over 1 indicates that more dollars are being spent on retail than are represented by the trade area population (we are bringing shoppers in), while a pull factor under 1 indicates that we are loosing shoppers. Often times, you will gain shoppers in some areas while loosing shoppers in others, and for other reasons mentioned above, pull factor ratios are problematic.
The loft example you cited is a version of Smart Growth. Create population density and the retailers will come. And, yes, the Smart Growth method can be used in any size of town. I hope the city considers changing their current strategy(?) to one that follows the Smart Growth method so Emporia citizens and businesses can enjoy the success you described in your post.
Posted by admireed (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 11:32 a.m. (Suggest removal)
momus...tell me more about Smart Growth?
Posted by momus (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 12:37 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Admireed,
Smart growth is a planning model that grew out of industrial areas throughout the U.S. Many communities over the past two decades have been faced with two major dilemmas: sprawl and redevelopment of existing infrastructure. Many communities had "brown field" sites (former industrial sites that were abandoned as jobs moved) that laid dormant, and cities both large and small were dealing with dilapidated portions of their communities. Both problems were one in the same: communities sought to expand their surface area faster than their population or jobs could support the expansion. The lack of managed growth created skyrocketing taxes, slums and community blight.
Several communities decided to alter their approach to focus on developing pre-existing infrastructure, developing policies to encourage population density and using planning and zoning ordinances to create livable, walk able, unique areas within communities. For more information, I suggest reading: http://www.smartgrowth.org/Default.asp?r...
case studies of towns of a variety of different sizes are included within the site. I would be happy to answer any follow up questions you might have!
Posted by create (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 12:52 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I can see where Emporia didn't have any "brown field sites," but as I was reading info on that website momus provided, I could certainly see central/downtown Emporia with its failing infrastructure, dilapidated areas, and all the sprawl to the northwest. Such an interesting web site, but I wonder if the city is even looking at this.
Posted by netloafer (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 2:39 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Momus
Thanks. My wife and I have seen first how how well Smart Plan works. The River Market is going through revitalization. We spend a weekend or two a month up there and always find it pleasant. We spend Saturdays at the Farmers' Market, where there is a lot of good produce available and lots of people. There are little restaurants for breakfast like Succotash or the City Diner. In the evening there are places like Harry's Country Club (which is actually a burger joint), the Blue Nile (Ethiopian), Bo Ling's (Chinese), a brew pub, and a nice little Italian restaurant. There is also fine dining within walking distance like Le Fou Frog (the crazy Frenchman). The city has also added special bus service, called the Max which will take you from the River Market to the Power and Light District, Crown Center, Union Station, and the Plaza, all for about a buck each way. The lofts where we live are just about all sold out and there are two or three other old brown field sites that are being retro-fitted into lofts or condos.
I've advocated for this type of model for Emporia, but have been told by city leaders that big city models don't work here. My answer has been is that the only differences are in the scale and in style of how the blighted areas are rennovated.
I've also advocated for a change in the types of employers we attract. One of the reasons our median incomes are so low is that our current development strategy is targeted toward low wage, low skill. The end result has been a local economy that cannot sustain the things that would improve quality of life and a tax base that is artificially high because of the low median value of the homes.
My wife attended E.S.U back in the late sixties and from what she's told me the downtown area used to be much more pleasant and liveable than it is today.
With current leadership going in the wrong direction, how do we turn this around? It seems like an almost insurmountable task. City leaders keep pursuing failed strategies, relying on what seems to be the fact that the public doesn't care. The Chamber of Commerce, the Visitors Bureau, etc seem to endorse this strategy. And whenever anyone says something about the problems they are tarred and feathered as "being too negative about our wonderful home town."
There are a lot of us who love this town and want things to improve. We believe that the right approach is to proceed from reality, see the problems, fix them, and make this a great place to live.
Posted by netloafer (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 2:43 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Momus
The Smart Plan website is great - plenty of links and resources. I've bookmarked it!
Posted by Pollyanna (anonymous) on April 7, 2008 at 2:52 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Just a note of thanks for the great discussion and education in this forum. Lots of good information and things to consider.
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