Inner city versus urban periphery retailing: store relocation and shopping trip behaviours. Indications from Saint-Etienne

Many recent studies stress the importance of freight facility location for urban freight movement. Although, tools and reflections are still lacking to shed light on shopkeepers’ location choices. Several reasons, e.g. the implementation of long-term city logistics measures or the threat of commercial rent increasing can lead retail-store keepers to move their business from city centre to surroundings. Therefore, it becomes critical for them as for urban policy makers to have tools for simulating or assessing the effects of such a choice on the business, and on the local economy, land-use and environment. This paper assumes that the shopkeepers’ choices are mainly influenced by whether their customers accept or reject this move. It aims to forecast the choice of customers to remain or not client of a retail store after its relocation in the urban periphery, by predicting the most significant factors, which are likely to influence their decision. Starting from some surveys carried-out before the movement of an actual city centre store in Saint-Etienne, the paper suggests a conditional inference tree rather than other tree-structured models for this analysis. Over the peculiarities of the store and the city, the model estimated and tested in this paper underpins many findings available in the general literature about shopping trips. The results seem to be indicating that not only customers’ residence, but also their shopping trip behaviours and wanderings are to be taken into account in a retail-store location decision.