Open all hours: Spatiotemporal fluctuations in UK grocery store sales and catchment area demand

Conventional population estimates do not account for spatiotemporal fluctuations in populations over a diurnal timescale at the level of retail store catchments. This presents challenges for the retail location-based decision making process which seeks to predict sales volumes and their temporal characteristics prior to new store construction. We present a novel analysis of the temporal fluctuations of store sales, evidencing links between the spatiotemporal distribution of specific population subgroups and temporal store sales. Previous research linking spatiotemporal populations and store sales is limited owing to the fact that commercial data are not openly available to academic research. However, this research has unprecedented access to store level temporal sales data and an established loyalty card scheme from a major UK grocery retailer making these analyses possible for the first time. Additionally, we demonstrate that current store classifications were inadequate for grouping stores with similar sales profiles and propose four new clusters of stores based on the times of the day that they generate revenues. This development has clear academic and commercial benefits, aiding our understanding of consumer behaviours and a novel solution for improved location modelling. We lay the foundations for further research building spatiotemporal demand fluctuations into retail location models.