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Thursday, 28 February 2013

Shop closures - regional variations

Saw this news article today about shop closures which has a table of closures and openings by region from which they calculate a net loss. I started wondering how useful such figures are given the varying  size of the regions?

So I popped the figures into Excel and had a play. Ideally, I'd know the total number of  shops in each region so I could come up with a percentage but that isn't provided. Instead, I added together the number of openings and the number of closures to come up with a proxy for the number of shops in each region and compared that total with the net change. This results in a "percentage" figure that's pretty bogus in isolation but does permit some feel for regional differences. Here's the result:


First, note the "Total" figure of 13%, that's a useful "average" to compare against individual regions. Greater London with 4% looks to have continuing retail prosperity while the West Midlands and North West with over 20% are not doing so well. 



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