Accounting Methods Drive Urban Planning Approach?

I'm a great fan of neighborhoods that are scaled and ordered for human beings traveling sidewalks under their own power -- well made urban environments, in other words. Here's an interesting theory why supermarket buildings get built on a suburban model even in DC urban environments they are poorly suited to: accounting methods.

Safeway and Giant ... primarily measure stores by their "average receipts", the average amount of money a customer spends on a single visit.

Adding small-ticket items like produce outside the store would bring in more customers and even more total profit, but decrease the average receipts. Despite raising the store's profits, the national headquarters would very likely see the change as diminishing the store's performance.

Wow. The performance measure for evaluating stores is inherently biased in favor of suburban stores and suburban-style shopping. Think about it: in the suburbs most shoppers come by car, lots of them in station wagons and SUVs and vans, and shop for a week's groceries at a time, or more, often for rather more than just one or two adults. It adds up to big per-trip totals. In a city, shoppers are more likely to be traveling on foot or public transit, and will only buy what they can comfortably carry on any given trip. This means shopping for a day or two at a time, for one or two people in many cases, with lots more trips. The average per-customer-trip sales of an urban store will inevitably be lower than those of a suburban store.

So even if an urban-styled store in an urban environment has bigger total sales, way better sales per square foot, and larger profit margins, if the measure of "performance" is receipts per customer trip, it will inevitably look worse on the performance charts when stacked against suburban stores. And any unsophisticated observer will focus on the 'superior performance' of the suburban-style store, rather than the bias of the performance model. And that unsophisticated observer might therefore think that suburban-style markets -- with vast tracts of parking lot out front, and big, faceless blank walls pointing toward the public -- are therefore what they should build more of. Even if an urban-style market would, for instance, have way better profit-per-square-foot.

It never previously occurred to me that the pressure point to get better urban environments might be getting retailers to change their performance accounting model. Go figure.

[Link thanks to Atrios]