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SMALL CENTRES TAKE THE LEAD AS PREFERRED SHOPPING DESTINATIONS
Over the past few years , there has been a noticeable worldwide trend of shoppers moving toward destination malls , as online shopping lures customers away from the traditional mall environment . South African trends have observed the same pattern emerging especially with recent mall developments – like the Mall of Africa and large refurbishments at Fourways Mall , both in Northern Johannesburg – are trying to establish themselves as market leaders by offering flagship stores and unique amenities .
In South Africa , however , another trend has emerged as evidenced through work done by Navigare Securities , a local stockbroking firm that also tracks the performance of mall-owning companies .
Aggregated and anonymised data from Tracker , analysed by data and analytics firm , Lightstone , showed that small community and neighbourhood centres outperformed the larger super-regional centres in 2019 .
For that year , visits to super-regional centres by trackedvehicles were down 1.8 % compared to the previous year , while visits to community centres and neighbourhood centres grew 3.0 % and 0.7 % over the same period . Navigare believes that this movement in 2019 was primarily due to the economically constrained consumer not visiting large malls to spend on luxury items , but continuing to visit closer , smaller centres for necessities .
This shift from large to smaller malls has now been amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic , with the large super-regional centres experiencing the most significant decline . For May 2020 , visits to super-regional malls were down a hefty 46 % when compared to the previous May , while visits to community centres were down 36 % and neighbourhood centres down 32 %.
“ This is a definite improvement from the total visits down 59.3 % in April compared to April the previous year , but again , we can see the super-regional malls taking the brunt of the decline ,” says Ruanne Foster , Head of Research for Navigare Securities .
To get an indication of which retailer would be most affected by this trend , Lightstone overlaid the retail locations of grocery and pharmacy chains with their tracked shopping centre database ( over 1 300 sites ).
Higher-end grocery retailers ( which tend to have more sites in larger malls ) were mostly impacted as visitors stayed away from
Table 1 : Recorded centre vist activity between 2019 and 2020
Navicare the large centres , while grocery retailers servicing the lower-income customer as well as retailers with more standalone stores were less impacted . In the pharmacy sector , Dis-Chem and Clicks seem to be impacted similarly according to insights derived from the data , although it must be noted that there is a strong likelihood of less frequent visits alongside increased basket sizes during the lockdown period .
A list of the individual outlets that gain the most in terms of having the highest proportion of their customer base being either new , or old customers now frequenting them more than before , is listed in Table 2 .
Table 2 : An analysis of major retailer visits in South Africa
These stores are either in small centres or standalone stores and generally serve the lower income customer . These stores benefitted from people who live in the area potentially not being able to shop at their usual places closer to work due to being locked down at home , or not being able to travel to their usual possibly larger malls .
Another reason could be that the lower income consumer cannot stock up for longer periods due to their constrained budgets and thus will still frequent local stores for necessities . “ Given the shift in patterns to smaller centres , it becomes more important to understand when consumers make regular shopping trips which is why Lightstone created the ShopSafe app in partnership with Tracker ,” says Linda Reid , Head of Data at Lightstone .
The Shopsafe app allows the user to view the relative attendance at a shopping centre on any specific day of the week and identifies how busy the centre is throughout the day . “ People are now able to plan their shopping trips by understanding how busy each shopping location is , any hour of the day ,” she concludes .
With this type of technology and movement trends , this data could possibly in future be incorporated into a building management system to create another avenue of efficiency as designers and engineers can monitor and make informed decisions based on actual gathered data . RACA
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