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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

square footage per capita is a misleading metric, coz it assumes that each square foot is equivalent in each country - and that a higher area equates to a higher spending and cost.

I think profit per-capita is a better metric. It's harder obtain that metric of course...

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Hmm.. per sqft seems to be reasonable.

Whichever country (given income equality and ignoring cultural disposition to consumption patterns) a human would need approx' same amount of goods, whether grocery, clothing or other such, and those items would occupy exact same space in all countries.

>those items would occupy exact same space

Not at all. Consider a toy store in Manhattan(or Tokyo) vs. one in Des Moines. The former would be naturally compact due to the expensive real estate while the latter could be far more expansive. By extension country-wide retail square footage can be expected to vary by density (in addition to other cultural factors).

Because I was curious, it looks like FAO Schwarz currently has a flagship store in NYC again, since November 2018, after some troubles and owner bankruptcies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAO_Schwarz

I still remember visiting one of the Fifth Avenue ones as a kid. Because yes, apparently you can build something as big as a department store, but all toys. :)

I heard the Rockefeller Plaza store is considerably smaller than the previous store across from the Plaza Hotel next to Apple.

Hamley's in London (UK) is the world's largest toy store. It is seven floors.

I have visited it once I think, but that was way before having kids. Feels like it would be a two-day exploration marathon now with our two boys. Hopefully travel will make sense at some point again.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamleys

Sure, they take the same space. That doesn't mean you need a sprawling store with an eatery to buy them in, nor do you need 12ft (3.6 meters) of a single laundry soap nor a full shelf of one type of ketchup.

Store layout and the space allotted for each product differs between places, in other words. I'm going to assume things like shelf height does as well. When these things are in the back room, they don't take up space in the same way as the sales floor. Also, it is quite possible that many retailers simply do not have the same sort of selection as they do elsewhere: If you sell fewer things, you don't need so much space.

If we're interested in the viability of retail across nations, revenue/sqft & cost/sqft seem the two most relevant metrics. I.e. How affordable is a business' retail space?

This would have the side effect of including varying levels of foot traffic (in revenue) and real estate price (in cost), which seem the two biggest differentiators.

12ft (3.6 meters) of a single laundry soap nor a full shelf of one type of ketchup.

This allows them to have smaller back rooms, fewer warehouse deliveries, and to restock only once a day.

Right, but where real estate costs are high compared to labor costs you will restock more than once a day to save on real estate. Where labor is high compared to real estate you use less labor.

Note that compared is key above. Real estate and labor are both more expensive in dense cities, but comparatively real estate is more important to optimize and so you pay the higher labor. Even though labor is cheaper in suburbs you sill optimize that because real estate is so much cheaper.

And the statistic we're discussing doesn't take into account warehouse space. So the UK may have a similar amount of space devoted to retail throughout the supply chain, just much more in the backend and smaller front end.

What? Do you have a source for them all taking the same amount of space? Bit of an assumption. For example, many stores in Tokyo are quite compact due to the real-estate cost, so I don't see how this applies generally.

A 1 kg of Tide detergent pack will occupy same space as in UK or US.

Profit per sq foot is really the golden metric here. The problem is that profits, generally, are a lot harder to data collect into a metric like that, and a lot of the private equity activity that doomed many retail chains in the US were designed to artificially inflate profits.

The three are all more or less related though.

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