Week 7: Spatial Ergonomics of Suburban Liquor Retail
Applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to interior retail environments to map the deliberate obfuscation of tax-efficient inventory.
Core reading: Spatial Optimization of High-ABV Inventory in Big-Box Liquor (Fenn, Journal of Retailing Analytics, 2022).
The Lecture#
This week, we transition from theory to applied reality. The interior of a big-box suburban liquor outlet (e.g., Dan Murphy’s) is not a passive warehouse; it is an environment actively designed to manipulate purchasing pathways.
Retailers are intimately aware of the ABV-to-dollar anomalies and WET loopholes we calculated in Phase I and II. Because these highly tax-efficient items (like cask wine) yield exceptionally low retail margins, store architects deliberately design the floor plan against the consumer. Highly efficient stock is physically quarantined in low-visibility, distant thoroughfares at the rear of the store. Conversely, highly taxed, high-margin inventory is placed directly in prime navigational sections. We will use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map these interiors, demonstrating how retailers use physical space to artificially inflate the average consumer’s index.
Applied Computational Lab#
In this week’s lab, you will quantify the spatial friction of a retail environment. You will load a provided CAD floor plan of a standard suburban big-box liquor store into QGIS.
Your task is to map the primary pedestrian vectors from the entrance turnstile to the most mathematically optimal ABV-to-dollar SKUs identified in Week 4. You will calculate the “walking penalty”—the literal distance in meters a consumer is forced to navigate past high-margin visual merchandising before reaching tax-efficient stock. You can interact with the Interactive Spatial Floor Plan widget on this page to visualize how discrete zones yield vastly different efficiencies. You must account for this spatial friction when mapping the physical extraction logistics of your Week 12 Event Portfolio.
Mandatory reading#
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Changing the density of alcohol outlets to reduce alcohol-related problems — Livingston, Chikritzhs & Room, Drug and Alcohol Review 26(5), 2007, 557–566. While this paper maps where outlets sit geographically within a suburb rather than where stock sits internally within the outlet, the analytical maneuver is exactly the same as our own. The authors treat physical position as a strictly measurable economic variable rather than passive background noise. Read this for the methodology of density mapping, which you will apply to interior retail shelves.
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Distances to on- and off-premise alcohol outlets and experiences of alcohol-related amenity problems — Wilkinson & Livingston, Drug and Alcohol Review 31(4), 2012, 394–401. This study measures physical distance against reported amenity effects. Our lecture’s core claim—that a physical walk constitutes a measurable economic cost—is not a metaphor. This paper provides the empirical shape of the evidence for that claim, proving mathematically that spatial friction directly dictates consumption patterns at scale.
Where the index-ranked catalogue ends up on the floor
The same standard-drinks-per-dollar index the toolkit computes for a shopping list, applied instead to shelf placement: the two lowest-index products in this catalogue occupy the entrance display and the checkout endcap, and the two highest-index products sit in the two aisles farthest from the door. Select a zone for its product and index.
Show zone assignments as a table
| Zone | Traffic | Product | Index (standard drinks / $) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entrance display | Prime | RTD cans, 10 × 375 mL | 0.289 |
| Checkout endcap | Prime | Premium RTD, 4 × 330 mL | 0.284 |
| Back aisle A | Low-visibility | Cask white, 4 L | 2.285 |
| Back aisle B | Low-visibility | Cask red, 2 L | 1.929 |
The week 7 lab: Mapping an outlet
Before the lab#
Visit one liquor outlet — the one attached to your catalogue retailer, if it has a physical store — and draw its floor plan. Paper is fine. Mark the entrance, the aisles, the refrigerated section, the endcaps and the counter. Note where the highest-ABV stock sits and where the cheapest per-standard-drink stock sits, because they are rarely the same place.
Conduct. You are a customer in someone’s shop. Do not obstruct aisles, do not photograph staff or other customers, and stop if you are asked to. A floor plan sketched from memory in the car park is a perfectly acceptable substitute and has been used for published work.
In the lab#
The plan as data. The week’s reading treats floor-plan geometry as a measurable determinant of throughput rather than a matter of taste. Distance from entrance, aisle width and sightline length are the three variables it fits, and all three are things you can pace out.
Two distances. Measure the walk from the entrance to the best index on the floor, and the walk from the entrance to whatever is stocked in the first three metres. Compute the index of both. The gap between them is the week’s argument in one number: the shopper who does not walk pays for the convenience, and the price of that convenience is set by the floor plan rather than by the product.
Comparing plans. Overlay the room’s sketches. Outlets converge on a small number of layouts, and the reading argues that the convergence is throughput optimisation rather than imitation. Decide whether your evidence supports that.
Afterwards#
You leave with a measured floor plan and two index values attached to two distances. Week 8 asks what the display at the short distance is doing to make that index harder to read.
What you leave the lab able to do
Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you. The assessments assume it has.
- you have a hand-drawn floor plan of one outlet with the high-ABV stock marked on it
- you can state the walking distance from entrance to the best index on the floor
- you have recorded the index of whatever is stocked within three metres of the entrance
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor