Investigating - 'The bigger the Shopping Centre, the greater the Market Area.'

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Hypothesis 3 – The bigger the Shopping Centre, the greater the Market Area.

Hypothesis 3 is all about market area and whether the size of a shopping centre sometimes determines how large the market area is. Market Area is basically how far people will travel to get to a certain place, and it can be compared with other Market Areas like I will be doing. For Hypothesis 3 I will use the three areas – Acocks Green, Fox Hollies and School Road, these will be used to determine how great their market areas are and how the market area is affected by other factors.

How far a person travels to get to a destination can be up to many conditions, the main thing that I will be looking at is the size of the areas, and how the size can sometimes give advantages over other market areas. Acocks Green is the biggest area out of the three – so it would be expected to have the greatest Market Area. School Road has the least amount of shops and is merely for convenience to people who live nearby; it is not that much of an attraction so would have an expected small Market Area.

I believe that the Hypothesis ‘the bigger the shopping centre, the greater the Market Area’ will indeed be true. There are many things to take in when discussing Market Area; Access is one of these things. A lot of the expansion in Market Area for some Shopping Centres can be attributed to the levels of Access that they have. It is not a coincidence that a large shopping centre with high levels of access will also have a big Market Area. An example of this would be the Bullring – it has amazing access, and people travel well out of an average Market Area for some shopping centres to visit it. The Bullring has a vast range of shops, it has several specialist shops – a better range of shops is another reason why some shopping centres have a great Market Area, visitors want the convenience of having a load of High Order shops in big centres like these. Acocks Green mainly has Low Order shops so it is for convenience to residents around it and Tyseley, people will possibly come to Acocks Green for everyday necessities – but it has some big names such as Argos, Boots and Sainsbury’s which give it an advantage over some rival centres as people would then want to visit there. Fox Hollies will probably begin to rise slightly in market area as it has Lidl based there, this is a growing supermarket which is beginning to attract. The Hypothesis will be true in my view as Acocks Green, the biggest shopping centre, has greater transport links which allow a good standard of access; it has several different routes to get to and from it – this contributes to why it is a pretty big shopping centre.

The convenience of Market Areas can have great effect, usually people will not want to travel to a shopping centre if all it consists of is 4 high order shops, and people will want convenience. Examples of convenience if travelling for high order shops would be somewhere like the Mailbox in Birmingham. It is better to travel to somewhere which has a mix of low and high order shops – such as Acocks Green than to travel very far to somewhere which has very few shops. Acocks Green, Fox Hollies and School Road all have a balance of Low and High Order shops:

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High/Low Order Table

The High/Low Order table shows the balance, it is favourable to Low Order shops. Usually shopping centres where there are a load of people will show that they have great access and a great mix of High Order Shops. A shopping centre with a lot of people shows that there is going to be a great demand for access – Acocks Green has a lot of people visiting it everyday, there is going to be a need for access, which means that more access sums up to a greater Market ...

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