The Physics of a Good Store Location

Roland Piquepaille writes, "In 'Atomic Physics Predicts Successful Store Location,' LiveScience reports that a French physicist has applied methods used to study atomic interactions for another task: to 'help business owners find the best places to locate their stores.' Pablo Jensen has used his method for the city of Lyon and is now developing software with the local Chamber of Commerce to help future business owners. Read more for additional references and maps of the city of Lyon showing for example the best locations to open a bakery, according to atomic physics." Jensen says that more research is needed to know if this method would work in other cities.

Comments

Roland Piquepaille Junk Science #2

[Anonymous Coward]

That's two Roland junk science articles that have made Slashdot today. I guess since people have stopped clicking links for him, Roland has to up the submission rates to the editors.

ONCE AGAIN, he is linking to the same zdnet blog that he has the last 4 times. Are you editors all dumb? Can you not figure out it's a ad-trap? I guess since we can't filter him, we have to make posts like this to bitch. Did I mention this is more junk science to ad rape us with? K...

So yea offtopic me all you want Roland (with your many accounts here), but since (as usual) this is a submission for ad clicks, I just want to say thanks for wasting my eyeballs again. Let's hope people realize this is crap before they post and click for him. Not that his links have anything to do with real science...which makes this whole submission offtopic.

Re:Roland Piquepaille Junk Science #2

[FhnuZoag]

While I can make no guesses as to the intent of the submitter, the article in question looks legit - it refers to a real future article in Physics Review E, which is a pretty well recognised peer reviewed journal dealing with Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter physics.

See http://scitation.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PLEEE8&Vo lume=74&Issue=3#MAJOR4

Re:Roland Piquepaille Junk Science #2

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, and thank you for the link to real article, which was NOT linked in the summary. The above poster's issue was with the sites that WERE linked in the summary.

Re:Roland Piquepaille Junk Science #2

[Eternauta3k]

Damn! The thousands of slashsdotters who will read the article and give him ad money! Oh wait...

Interesting

[guardiangod]

I know people (usually the business types) who can go to an empty store location, look around for 3 minutes and tell you whether the location is good or not.

Even on the same street, stores on one side may be "live" while stores on the other side may be "dead".

tag: pigpile

[Janek Kozicki]

I saw once this tag used for this submitter. Let's use it from now on! (/me tags pigpile)

Finally, a practical use for physics.

[boyfaceddog]

Next in the pipeline - physicists work with news editors to produce useless but well-targeted articles.

How To Block Roland Piquepaille

[Anonymous Coward]

For Firefox users, this Greasemonkey script will hide stories submitted by Roland Piquepaille:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5738

Interesting - but not a general solution.

[Bender0x7D1]

This is great when you create a model based on a single town/city/location and apply it to that city/town/location, but that doesn't mean it is transferable.

For example, there are many small town or villages in wine regions in the midwest U.S. where there are multiple wineries/shops/bakeries that are right next door to each other and do quite well. According to this model, many of those bakeries should fail. In fact, it is the shops farther away from the "main street" that have the fewest customers. The same in historical/heritage communities. In the Amana Colonies in Iowa - same thing - multiple bakeries beside each other with similar merchandise but all full of customers.

What is missing in this model is how different cultures view the shopping experience. In the U.S., we seem to prefer going to a single area and having a large number of similar shops. If we want to buy a car, we prefer to hit an area where there are numerous dealers so we can find a good deal. We would rather drive past a local bakery to hit WalMart so we can save a few dollars. Since most american families own a car, how the distance and time affect things is different than in Europe. We don't shop locally by default, which is why WalMart can kill small businesses for miles around.

Now, I'm not saying that this model is bad, but the locality, culture an demographics needs to be taken into account, so this isn't a generic model that can be applied everywhere, but a technique that other localities can use to create their own model.

It would also be interesting to see how large changes such as extended construction on a major road, or the construction of a new mall/housing complex/office building would affect the model.

Re:Interesting - but not a general solution.

[Pink Tinkletini]

In urban planning and economics, this is called location theory. See, for instance, "The Geography of Entrepreneurship in the New York Metropolitan Area," published last year in the Economic Policy Review, which describes one such model as you describe. (Warning, PDF with 3.4 MB of cool maps.)

Yeah according to Quantum Physics

[CrazyJim1]

We wouldn't need doors on the stores because we could just phase through the walls.

Emergence

[Infonaut]

There's an intriguing discussion of geographic distribution of commerce in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Stephen Johnson.

It's a great read, and it gave me all kinds of nonlinear insights into How The World Works that I hadn't really thought about before. It also definitely made me want to bust out Sim City again.

But we already know how to do that...

[jonadab]

> help business owners find the best places to locate their stores

Um, we already know how to find the optimal location for a store. You look for where there's a McDonald's, and you locate the store right next to it. Couldn't be simpler. _How_ McD's always manages to find exactly the perfect spot, I'm not sure, but I've yet to see one suboptimally located, so plopping down next to them should be a pretty reliable way to find a really good spot.