15. APP J. Economic Needs Report

6 ANALYSIS OF IMPACTS

This section analyses the sales potential for the proposed development within the competitive context of retailing
in the study area.


6.1 IMPACT ON EXISTING RETAILERS
Supermarket-based centres will meet the vast bulk of an area’s population’s retailing requirements. This is
particularly the case for groceries where some 80% of household expenditure is captured by the retailing majors.
Retail offers of ~200m2 or so are usually not considered to represent a competitive offer to the retailing majors.
The proposed retailing offer, as integrated within a service station development, is extremely unlikely to ever
compete directly with the kind of retail offer of the majors.
Indeed, it can be seen that the modern service station with ancillary retail now fulfils the function of the old
“corner store”. Increasingly, service stations offer a range of convenience retailing, to meet the 24/7 needs of
nearby residents, workers and drive-through customers. Today’s consumers are actually accustomed to this
function being offered by modern service stations, and expect them to be able to supply a reasonable range of
household conveniences.
It is unlikely that a modest convenience offer attached to a service station with the floorspace configuration as
provided for by the analysis above would cause significant impacts on the major supermarkets and centres
servicing the area today and into the future. This is for the following main reasons:
     •    The proposed development has a general retailing offer component of ~223m2 some of which will be
          dedicated to “back of house” uses, storage etc, which cannot offer the range and lines of products that
          would be offered by the other grocery supermarkets servicing the Trade Area, and therefore fulfills a
          genuinely convenience function; and
     •    The spatial distribution of the centres within the Trade Area environment provides all existing retailers
          as well as the proposed centre with reasonable unique sub-catchments, which they can service to a high
          level. Refer to Map 2 above.


6.2 SUSTAINABLE RETAIL FLOORSPACE
The amount of floorspace that can be sustained by a trade area’s expenditure is dependant on average turnover
per square metre of floorspace for the different retail categories. This is often described as the Retail Turnover
Density (RTD).
Establishing an RTD for a given location is difficult, as there is usually limited information available on retail
performance of centres in specific localities. The most comprehensive survey on turnover was last undertaken by
the ABS in the 1991/92 retail Census that surveyed all retailers. This data is now considerably outdated and is
considered to be unreliable in determining present day performance. This retail census was followed up in
1998/99 with a survey of a sample of tenants and provides national average data on RTD. As such, while it is more
current it does not provide location specific trading performance data. However, it is the best available source of
information and is widely used by retailers to benchmark performance.
Based upon the ABS 1998/99 Retail Industry Survey, the RTD used for the purposes of this assessment is
summarised in Table 4.




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