Marketing

Why physical-world behavior is essential in retail store site selection

Real-world mobility data is becoming more valuable as retail store formats shrink.

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September 18, 2026 by Judy Mottl — Editor: RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com, Connect Media

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The small format retail store strategy has increasingly been taking root as retailers strive to save costs while also meeting the ever-changing needs of today's shopper.

The most recent is electronics retailer Best Buy, which aims to enhance the customer experience while also providing retail stores for customers located in regions where a full-size store can't be established. Best Buy's smaller store approach features locations ranging from 12,000 to 15,000 square feet, compared to a full size store that is 12,000 to 25,000 square feet.

But whether a retailer is looking to drive a smaller format strategy or expand the full-size location fleet, the key to success is choosing the right location.

Analytics in play

To do that retailers typically evaluate potential sites using a slew of analytics — from demographics and traffic volumes to radius maps.

None of those, however, capture how customers really move through an area and whether a store will be convenient for the local customer base.

That's where mobility data analysis can play an invaluable role in site selection. It can provide insight into where customers will originate from, how they travel and accessibility by route, direction and time of day.

Such real-world mobility data is becoming even more valuable as store formats shrink.

To gain deeper insight on how mobility data helps retailers ensure a successful store site decision RetailCustomerExperience reached out via email to interview Michael Cottle, senior vice president at Inrix, a provider of transportation data and analytics on how people move throughout a day. It provides real-time traffic, parking and mobility insights to automotive companies, cities, and transportation agencies worldwide.

Cottle has built successful software businesses and has expertise in alternative data markets such as financial services and retail site selection. Prior to Inrix he held executive-level positions at companies including Mapbox, deCarta (acquired by Uber), Apple and Telenav. He also led the development of deCarta's navigation solution, which today forms the basis of Uber's driver navigation app.

Q: Can you provide insight on what mobility data should be part of the site selections process and why?

Cottle: For retailers, particularly QSRs and gas retailers, vehicle activity outside their intended locations can be a critical factor in determining the profitability of a future store.
For instance, when evaluating a potential location for a coffee or donut store, it's important to be on the side of a divided road that is going in the direction of the morning commute. And understanding the specific morning traffic volume, not just an annual average volume, is critical to understanding the potential profitability of that location. The retailer can correlate that volume of traffic with another existing store's volume of traffic (mixed with demographic and other information) to determine the feasibility and profitability of that store. But it's the "hour of the day" mobility data that is important and not just the annual average for all days of the week.

Q: Do most retailers collect mobility data at this point, or if they have it, do they recognize the value in the real estate strategy?

Cottle: Most retailers do not collect mobility data except for their drive-thru transactions.

Q: Why is physical-world behavior becoming an essential part of retail site selection?

Cottle: What we hear from our retail customers is that because there are so many choices available for coffee or a burger or a taco, when it comes to making a decision where to stop, ease of access to the location — and therefore being on the right side of the street where the volume of traffic is heading — becomes a factor in the success of that retailer. We have an anecdote from our customer (a QSR that relies heavily on drive-thru traffic) that they made a major mistake by placing an outlet on the wrong side of the street for dinner-time traffic. They ended up tearing down that location and moving half a mile down the road on the opposite side of the freeway because that's where the higher volume of evening traffic existed.

Q: As retailers are starting to go small format with stores, does that make mobility data even more critical in the site selection process?

Cottle: Both pedestrian and vehicular movement data are increasingly critical in influencing the site selection process for smaller footprint locations. We are working with a large Midwest supermarket chain that is rapidly growing its gas and forecourt locations. They are recognizing that vehicle mobility data is highly valuable to this process.

There are other ways that mobility data can help inform these site selection decisions. For instance, by determining where drivers are coming from using trip data, retailers can determine if drivers from their target demographic are passing by the potential new location.

Mobility data can also be used to power drive time polygons to help answer, "What is the catchment area that is a 15-minute drive in the evening from a potential site?" This geographic area can then be overlaid with census data to again understand whether that catchment area contains the target demographic for that grocery store.

About Judy Mottl

Judy Mottl is the editor of RetailCustomerExperience.com and DigitalSignageToday.com at Connect Media. She is an award-winning editor, reporter and blogger who has worked for top media for nearly four decades, including AOL, InformationWeek and Internet News, as well as for leading technology providers including HP. She’s written everything from breaking news to in-depth industry trends and reported on technology long before the internet arrived, including the debut of the first smartphone. When she's not sharing insights on digital signage deployments and trends in retail customer experience she's on the beach or watching the latest live murder trial.

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