Brent Cross shall have a bigger sphere of influence than High Wycombe

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Introduction:

 The sphere of influence of a site is also known as its catchment area. A sphere of influence is how far people are willing to travel for a service or product. The two sites that I shall be using to investigate the sphere of influence will be Brent Cross and High Wycombe. The reasons why I have chosen the following sites is that there is a stark contrast between the size of the settlements and the number and quality of services with in these settlements.

The aim of my inquiry is:

-To see whether people travel further for better quality goods.

-To investigate the differences in sphere of influence between my two sites.

-To investigate the factors affecting the sphere of influence.

Hypothesis:

I choose HMV record store in Brent Cross because it is based in a large shopping center, as it is a big shopping center it will tend to attract more people, so it seemed practical to collect my data for my project here. In one of the shopping centers that I have chosen there is a variety of shops inside. These shops are from high order to a low order. The high order shops are more commonly known as a specialist shop; examples of these are electronic shops or Marshall.

I also choose Virgin record store in High Wycombe, because it is based in a medium sized center, as it’s only a medium sized shopping center I don’t expect it to attract as many people as the HMV in Brent Cross would. It also doesn’t have as many specialized shops or better quality shops. I have found information regarding both towns and have found out that Brent Cross has 110 stores while High Wycombe has 50.        

The reason why I choose HMV and Virgin is because I am interested in music and so was curious about how the sphere of influence of these two stores differs and also what factors can affect the sphere of influence. The theory I shall be using to find and investigate the breaking point is Reilly’s law of retail gravitation.

My hypothesis is that Brent Cross shall have a bigger sphere of influence. The reason why I think this is because Brent Cross provides more services in terms of variety and quality. It also has more parking space, which could influence people’s choice of shopping center. That is if all the people shop logically, and decide to shop at the nearest shopping center, which is convenient to them. Brent Cross also has a bigger population and is based in London. So from all of these I think that it is reliable to say that Brent Cross will have a bigger sphere of influence compared to High Wycombe’s.

Methodology

The method I shall be using to obtain my data would be a questionnaire. The questions that I will need to ask will be how far they have traveled and from what town and whether or not they will travel further for better quality. I choose 20 people from each site in a randomly fashioned order so that my results are not biased. The way I went about choosing randomly was that I choose every 2nd person that I saw. I felt that 20 people from each site was necessary to provide enough information for me to introduce certain conclusions. Apart from having a random sampling I also did a pilot questionnaire to sample the effectiveness of my questionnaire.

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Pilot Questionnaire

Geography Questionnaire

  1. How often do you come to the shop?

2. Where do you come from?

3. Why do you come to this shop?

4. Where do you travel for your holiday?

5. How much on average do you spend at this store?

6. What sort of things do you buy at this store?

7. When you travel, are the things bought predominantly for you or other people?

8. Do you visit similar stores around this area?

The problems with my pilot questionnaire were that ...

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