Customers’ Assessments of Retail Traditional Local Markets: Strategy Outcome Performance Screening

This study assesses customers’ assessments of place sustainabilityPlace sustainability and place attractiveness of a large-scale traditional local market (TLM). The study proposes a general theory of antecedentsAntecedents and outcomes for customer assessments of place sustainability and place attractiveness for one category of TLM: a collection of many independent shops (e.g., 1000 to 10,000+ shops) available contiguously in one geographic area (i.e., a long-period market)—spanning generations of shop-keeping family stores, large in scale and scope, and selling a wide range of products of very substantial varieties, with many shops marketing to ultimate consumers, retailers, or a mix of retailers and consumers. Rather than using the currently dominant theory and research logic of proposing and testing symmetrical directional hypothesis (i.e., increasing X associates with increases in Y) and the reporting of net effects of independent variables, the study reports generalizable asymmetric case-based models of TLM sustainabilitySustainability and attractiveness. Case-based modeling proposes that certain screening rules of antecedent conditions enable identifying cases having certain outcomes consistently (e.g., frequent visits and high expenditure outcomes). The study includes findings from a survey of customers (n = 162) of their assessments of place sustainability and place attractiveness of SeomunSeomun (“West Gate”) Market, a large TLM in Daegu CityDaegu City, Republic of Korea. The findings support the general conclusions that TLM place sustainabilityPlace sustainability and place attractiveness models associate with shoppers having high rates of visiting and expenditures consistently as well as additional models indicating that certain place sustainability and attractiveness models associate with cases having infrequent visits and low expenditures.