Re: [MLUG] Inferior States

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 01:15:19 -0500, Daniel Nowlin <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> Well this bites for us.  I thought they would hit KC or StL befor going east
> of Missouri.  Maybe they just think that we hicks in flyover country do not
> know anything about puters...... :/

Not true, just the fact that there simply aren't as many geek hicks in
any one place as there are geeks in (say) Chicago.  There are like 9
MILLION people in the Chicago metro area.  St. Louis (say) would have
to be 5 times geekier than Chicago and/or have some extraordinary real
estate opportunity to get a Fry's ahead of the Windy City.  Similarly,
Detroit (Ann Arbor), DC, Boston*, Philadelphia, Atlanta and other
places are probably ahead of St. Louis on the list.  For that matter,
it's not clear to me that Overland Park, KS wouldn't be ahead of St.
Louis, since that so looks like a place you'd expect to see a Fry's,
if it were in California.

Back when I was grousing about the complete lack of a decent new
bookstore in Columbia, I spent some time figuring out how to predict
(or whether you could expect) a chain of size N growing at rate R with
a given geographical spead to come into your area of target size P. 
It turns out this stuff is surprisingly lawful.  Columbia was truly
and completely "due" for a Borders or B&N since like the mid-90s, and
was a likely target for Best Buy once the 2000 census came out.  The
same line of thinking will show (if memory serves) that the biggest
"gap" in our current chain line-up is either Pottery Barn or  a "Bed,
Bath, &  Beyond" (not that I care) and an Embassy Suites (class)
hotel.  Columbia is much geekier than a lot of the Midwest, but not
large enough (yet) to attract developer interest as anything more than
a secondary market.

jking
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