How do Millennials and Gen Zs Affect the Recovery of the Retail District?

The recovery pattern before and after the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic differs by urban commercial districts. Meanwhile, Cox et al.(2004)1 revealed intergenerational linkages between parents and children in consumption behavior. For example, millennials and Gen Zs attract attention as urban consumers, having their parent generation as open and wealthy baby boomers and Gen Xs. Since these generational characteristics are rising as an essential factor in retail, empirical research is needed. The change in the characteristics of the commercial district consumption population demands a change in perception of the population and the regional factors considered in studies about the vitality of commercial districts. Therefore, this study aims to determine how consuming population and regional characteristics change a commercial district's stagnation and recovery pattern. To this end, we identified the type of resilience in commercial districts through DTW(Dynamic Time Warping) clustering, a machine learning method based on quarterly sales and floating population changes in 1,306 commercial districts in Seoul for 5.5 years from 2017 to the first half of 2022. Furthermore, it analyzes the leading causes that affect each type of commercial district's resilience with multinomial logistic regression. In detail, the demographic traits consist of the characteristics of visitors, residents, and workers around commercial districts. This detailed approach to the population factor was possible due to the government-driven data accumulation over the past five years, including origin-destination data based on mobile phone signal data. The analysis shows that the size of newly developed housing and offices near the commercial district, access to public transportation, and households with three or more members, including baby boomers, had a significant impact. Considering that the child generation of the baby boomers is the millennials, this study is meaningful in that it demonstrates the mutual consumption impact between the millennial-baby boomers and the Z-X generation at the urban commercial level. The results of this study can contribute to the revitalization of urban commercial districts and consumer trends of stakeholders such as government agencies, retail developers, and investors in situations where low birth rates, aging, and changes in generation characteristics affect urban vitality. 1. Waldkirch, A., Ng, S., & Cox, D. (2004). Intergenerational linkages in consumption behavior. Journal of Human Resources, 39(2), 355-381.