[discostu]

I was thinking about this stat overnight. And I’ve decided it’s another one of those “lies, damned lies, and statistics” stats. 23 sq ft of retail per person sounds huge. But it isn’t. A queen sized bed is 32.5 sq ft. So that retail space is less than 1 queen sized bed. And given the percentage of folks with spare bedrooms and rollouts and hideaways that means the average person probably has in their home more sq footage of bed per person than there is retail space per person. Add in hotels, hospitals, homeless shelters and the like and there’s probably over 100 sq ft of bed in this country for every person. And nobody thinks that’s unsustainable.

And of course that 23 sq ft of retail space includes the actual stuff being sold too. Plus fixtures. So while that number sounds huge when you first see it, when you start working it you realize that if we all went to the store at the same time it would be freaking crowded.

[Alberta's Child]

The number itself is not meaningful, especially when you try to compare it to bedroom sizes, hotel rooms, etc. The better comparison would be to the same ratio in different geographical and historical contexts. I know this figure is way out of proportion from both a historic perspective (I believe the U.S. averaged about 10 square feet of retail space per capita from the 1940s through the 1980s) and a geographic perspective (the article linked below cites an astonishing figure of only 2.5 square feet of retail space per capita in Europe). I've dealt with real estate consultants and developers on a regular basis over the years, and they have all pointed to this figure as a compelling piece of evidence that the U.S. was due for a serious round of consolidation in retail development.

Retail in 2015: A Reality Check