Regionalism in US retailing

This paper presents a broad spatial analysis of the domestic patterns of major US retail chains. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and statistics examine the degree to which 50 of the largest chains are deployed regionally versus nationally. We investigate whether factors such as the age of the chain, store count, or the size of the markets in which stores are located (or founded) are related to the level of regional concentration. Regional bias is found to be associated with store counts, small market deployment, and the location of the founding store, but not the age of the chain. Also, chains that started in smaller markets deploy more stores in other small markets and vice versa for chains that started in larger markets.