Joshua John Kitz
Specialty Independent Retail: Hobby Shop Classification and Location © 2011
The chief purpose of the study is to provide academically sound information on hobby retailers and to make recommendations on suitable potential locations for successful new stores. Hobby stores are mostly independent retailers who carry comics and hobby games (role-playing games, wargames, collectible card games). This paper presents primary research on a population of 90 stores in the Golden Horseshoe with more detailed data on sample of 51 largely independent comic and game retailers in the Greater Toronto Area. It provides important background research on the industry and the retailers themselves. Each of the 51 retailers participated in a interview and site visit. Discriminant analysis verifies that using sources where stores are listed (in this case the yellowpages under ‘comics’, the WotC store locator and the Games Workshop store locator) is a reasonable shorthand for the creation of trade areas using Thiessen Polygons. These trade areas are presented in the paper along with location recommendations based on them for the full 90 stores. The 7 types of stores discovered through hierarchical cluster analysis (Comic Focussed, Gaming Store, Gift and Games, Miniature Wargames Store, The Card Gaming Shop, The Diverse Store, and The Comic Store) are used along with other store characteristics to create weighted Thiessen polygons. The trade areas created by the weighted Thiessen polygons further provide recommendations for potential store locations as well as being combined with census data to estimate the potential gross revenue of each store. The study also found a deliberate dispersion (or unclustering) of stores across space through time and shows that most new stores are game-oriented while a number of comic-oriented stores have recently closed. It concludes that sources where a store is listed is indeed statistically related to the types of products it carries, that there are 7 types of hobby stores, and provides gross revenue estimates for 51 stores. It recommends two locations in particular as excellent spots for new hobby shops.