margin data and wholesale & retail trade

Hi Jimmy, Typically you will make the choice between wholesale and retail on the basis on which venue the purchases were made through. Since you know this, then you can just choose the appropriate Sector. You are correct that there is just one Sector for all wholesale trade. This is because Sectors are based on relative relationships of commodities required for operations and while wholesale trade can and does accommodate a large variety of commodities, the requirements for operating a wholesale facility are relatively uniform regardless of what product is being sold. As you noted, when the products being purchased are unknown, there is no way to determine what was produced to be sold, how the item or items were transported, or (relative to a retail purchase) what portion of the total sales cost went to a wholesaler. Since none of these items can be determined their local availability is also unknown. As a result of this, the only local impact that the model can apply to the Multipliers is the impact of the respective wholesale or retail operations related to those sales. Thus if you were to enter a million dollars of gross retail sales into a retail Sector where the retail Margin was 24%, then 76% or $760,000 would be immediately leaked from the local economy and the remaining $240,000 would be applied to purchases of commodities and services required to operate the retail or wholesale establishment. While it's impressive that you went out and found the "Common Margins" table. You actually don't need it for anything in IMPLAN. When you select the retail or wholesale Sector you will be asked to choose Gross Retail Sales or Gross Retail Margin. You will want to choose Gross Retail Sales. When you have made this selection, IMPLAN will automatically apply the appropriate Margin for that Sector from the "Common Margins" table. Gross Retail Margin would only apply if the value you were entering represented only the operational costs of the retailer - i.e., just the retailer's portion of the total sale value (24% in the example above). Please let us know if you have any additional questions. IMPLAN Support Team

Is there anyplace in IMPLAN where I can actually find these retail margins. I have sales data for a large number of segments in every state and need to find out the retailing impact for them. If I do this one item at a time I need to run the sales without margins, get the job number and then run the job number with margins to get the marginal impact in the sector. I need to do this 30 times in each state. I noticed in Edit Margins, that the actual retail margin appears, is there anyplace where I can just download a table of retail margins for each state? Thanks

so right now we are dividing sales by output per employee on margins NO and getting a number of jobs then running that number through the same sector with margins YES Is that what i have to do? Are the retail margins the same in each state???? Help!

Hi John What initial value are you starting with? We are unclear on your methodology and want to be sure we provide you with the best support possible. If you have sales data, then the projected Employment value associated to the Gross Retail Sales would be the appropriate Employment based on the underlying data in IMPLAN, you shouldn't need to make any additional adjustments. You can prove this to yourself by using the Edit screen to see what portion of the Industry Sales value is left after the Margin percentage is applied. The Employment estimate when Gross Retail Sales is applied to an Industry Sales value that is equal to store sales will be identical to the value of the Employment estimation for the Margined portion of the Industry Sales entered as Gross Retail Margin. Unfortunately there is no direct way to view Margins in IMPLAN. However we can provide you the table of Margins if you let us know what data year you are working with. While Margins are specific to a yearly data set, they are national level values and actually will not vary from state to state.