400 vs full food retail/grocery industry
Hello,
We are working on a contribution analysis of grocery stores in our state's economy and wrestling with how close we believe the 400 - Food & Beverage Stores sector aligns with the types of stores we would like to include. For example, one might also make the case that gas stations, drug stores or general merchandise stores that are important food retail outlets are a part of the grocery industry. As we are particularly interested in food retail, we might want a way to exclude (or at least distinguish) data from taxable sales of things like alcohol, cleaning products, etc.
Would you have any recommendations for how to best model this given some of these concerns? We are investigating sources of data that more closely match how we'd ideally want to define the industry.
Thanks very much,
Laura
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Hi Laura. The Retail Sectors in IMPLAN represent only the Retail activity and thus their spending patterns do not include items that are sold in the retail stores themselves. So the retail operations for grocery will differ primarily in their electrical requirements and other operational aspects that differentiate the operational costs of a Retail grocer from another type of Retailer. If you are interested in looking at the impacts of Retail sales in your area of specific commodities, you can Margin these commodities and this will allow you to get more specific values for local production. However it is important to note that to do this you need to have the retail value of those commodity sales for your region, and that while you can distribute those sales over multiple retailers, you will not get specific Retail tax for different commodities by this mean, as the taxes associated to the Retail Sector are an average of all the products that go through that Retail Sector. If neither of these seems to address your concerns perhaps you could help us understand a little better what you are trying to determine from the Model. -
Hi there, thanks for the reply. I think the question is more about whether a multi-industry (industries as defined by IMPLAN) approach is appropriate here, since we are interested in the total spending patterns and contribution of what we might call the food retail industry (our own definition), which includes not just food and beverage stores but also some of the other types I mentioned. -
Hi Laura, A multi-industry contribution analysis would be fine here, in the sense of including more types of retailers than just grocery stores. But in that case, I presume you would not want to include the entire output level of the other retail types since you do not want to include the impact of gasoline sales, clothing sales, etc. – do you have data on the percentage of sales from each retail type that are food and non-alcoholic beverages? Similarly, you would not want to count the entire output level of the retail grocery sector since, as you’ve mentioned, you do not want to count alcoholic beverages. Here is a link to our contribution analysis case study: http://implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=366 A simpler method, rather than making a lot of assumptions about each retail type if you don’t have data on sales by type of commodity, might be to just use sector 400 and say “We know that using the entire output amount of the grocery store sector would seem to overstate the impact since grocery stores sell more than just food, but we also know that other retail stores (i.e., gas stations) also sell food and since we are not including those sales, we are compensating for any non-grocery sales by the grocery store sector.” In other words, you’d be assuming it is a wash – the overstatement cancels out the understatement. Of course, if you do have data on the break-out of food sales by each type of retailer, that is definitely your preferred method. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance!
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