Stemming retail leakage with a sense of community: Leveraging the links between communal ties and shopping decisions

Abstract

Retail business development is a broad goal for both private business interests as well as local policymakers, yet the goal of retail opportunities for local residents themselves is often seen as secondary. This paper considers the argument that retail opportunities and sense of community are in fact linked in important ways, links that reinforce the social fabric of a community and/or neighborhood. The paper first briefly reviews the inherent linkages between retail shopping and local development patterns, and then considers the sense of community in the context of Garfield County in western Colorado. Based on the key questions derived from this background, we formally test the inter-relationship between local retail spending and sense of community from detailed survey data, then more broadly consider the factors that critically shape a locality's “sense of community.” These findings shape several important policy implications.

Notes

1 Colorado Department of Higher Education (CDHE, 2011), http://highered.colorado.gov/Finance/Residency/statutes.html.

2 Colorado State Demography Office (CSDO, 2011), http://dola.colorado.gov/demog/pop_cnty_forecasts.html.

3 Prior to analysis, standard data preparation steps were taken. Each survey question was reviewed to understand the data type of the possible answers: binary, ordinal, continuous, write-in. Questions with write-in responses were not incorporated into the analysis. Next, it was noted for each question how non-answers or missing responses were coded so that a missing response could be standardized as such across all survey questions. Lastly, the distributions of each question's responses were tabulated, mainly as a reference for determining the questions/answers that were rare or did not have meaning across all respondents.

4 For a comparison of the survey responses and retail leakage, please see Appendix A.