Interpreting "output"

Hi Jeffery, Great questions. Most likely the difference you are seeing between the reported Direct Output and the $11.5MM that you entered is related to that fact that you are using one or more Retail Sectors in IMPLAN. When you chose a Retail Sector in IMPLAN, you are asked to choose between the default Gross Retail Sales and Gross Retail Margin. You likely correctly choose the default Gross Retail Sales. However, the Retailer only keeps a small portion of the sales price for their operating costs (typically 16-30% depending on the retailer type), because the rest of the final purchasing cost that we pay as customers is actually paid out by the retailer to transport, wholesale and the producer. When you use a Retail Sector, IMPLAN has no idea what the basket of products purchased was (e.g. if I go to a gas station I could purchase soda, gasoline, candy and windshield wiper fluid), and typically this is correct because you also don't have the information to specifically delineate the customer's purchases. Since IMPLAN doesn't know what was purchased it cannot estimate how it was wholesaled, transported, or produced, nor can IMPLAN estimate if any of these activities were local. Since the software doesn't have the ability to determine these values it leaks the wholesale, transport and producer Margins from the region and only looks at the values of the local retailer's operations. You should be able to verify this by going into the Detail Results tab, setting the View By: to Output and then clicking on the Direct column header to sort all the Direct results to the top. You will notice that the values you entered into Retail Sectors will be markedly less than you entered values for this reason. This can be a little hard to work with and explain sometimes, but we want to reiterate that unless you know exactly what was purchased, this is the correct option, you would not want to choose Gross Retail Margin in either case. Please let us know if you have any additional questions.