If Taylor’s H-E-B customers are any indication, the city is attracting a wide range of people to its businesses.
On Thursday, April 14, the Taylor City Council received a presentation on the city’s trade area analysis from Aaron Farmer with The Retail Coach, a national retail consulting, market research and development firm.
“We looked at about 75 different sectors,” said Farmer, Retail Coach president. “The good news is your demand for retail, your demand for all of these sectors, I think all of them are growing. We see that you’ve got a 2.95% overall compound annual growth rate. We look for anything in that 1-3% range as healthy.”
The Retail Coach used mobile location data tracking to determine Taylor’s retail trade area.
“We did a cell phone analysis over the 12 months of 2021,” said Famer. “You had about 136,000 unique consumers that walked into H-E-B. That’s a lot of people, obviously much larger than the city limits here in Taylor so you’re pulling people from outside of the community. Those could be consumers that are coming here on a regular basis or it could be consumers maybe they’re in town for a baseball game.”
There were 1.14 million visits to H-E-B. Numbers were also shown for Walmart, Applebee’s, Taylor Plaza and downtown Taylor to show where shoppers are coming from that end up shopping in our community. Analysis showed the north Taylor businesses at and surrounding H-E-B attracted customers from small towns while downtown pulled customers from the Austin metropolitan area looking for unique experiences.
Retail Coach also presented reports of Taylor’s demographics, retail trade area, retail demand outlook and retail psychographic report on the shoppers in Taylor’s trade area.
As demand grows, Farmer advised what sectors – restaurants, stores, etc. — could grow while also warning against “retail leakage,” when shoppers leave Taylor to go elsewhere.
“We’re never going to be able to capture all of that leakage, but if you could reduce it by 10%, 20%, that’s sales tax dollars that stay here in the community. The ways you do that – existing businesses expand, entrepreneurs come in open a new business or you look at looking at bringing somebody from the outside.
For the full presentation, visit http://www.taylortx.gov/660/taylorvideos.
