To develop my criteria I conducted interviews at existing consignment stores to see what aspects of their location the owners and workers felt played a significant role in their success.  I visited stores on Main street and in Gastown, because these are the areas I shop in.  To be completely honest, these are also the only areas I knew these stores existed.  Following are the criteria I came up with from the interviews, along with the basic reasoning behind them.

• Nearness to other stores -  This criteria got partially mixed responses.  One proprietor felt that competition would be detrimental to a new store, as large well-established stores like Front & Co. would control your supply and squeeze you out of the market (yes, this even happens with second hand clothes!).  The other stores I talked to disagreed with this (one of which was two stores away from Front & Co.), saying that nearness to other stores increased the foot traffic to their stores.  The idea of increased foot traffic has two sides, as well.  In one way it increases the amount of people walking in and out of your store each day.  On the other hand, most of these people are browsers and will tend to look through every store before deciding to purchase one item....is it in your store?  Nearness to other stores also brings the worry of increased gentrification.  Main street is the new consignment area (formerly it was west 4th, who knew), and this growth is concomitant with the gentrification running rampant in the area.  This means higher lease prices for a starting store.  And if you try to get in on the ground floor of the next 'up-and-coming-trendy' neighbourhood you have to think about building good relationships with your landlord to avoid hefty lease increases.  Although these are all good points, I still felt that nearness to other consignment stores would be a positive thing. Three stores I interviewed said that relationships were formed between stores, where they would pass on consignments and recommend each other.  This, they said, is due to each store carrying a slightly different range of selection.  From personal experience I felt that nearness was a good thing.  Although I'm a browser, I still do buy. But I've never bought anything from a consignment store that isn't near any others, because I've never been to one. I don't know where they are.  I did however, take the competition of other stores into account during my spatial analysis.  I used one Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) that rated areas with more stores as more suitable, and one that rated areas with 3 to 6 stores as suitable and areas with <3 or >6 as unsuitable. Where are the Existing Stores

• Customer Demographic -  The demographic is hard to define, because it is quite broad.  Most stores said their customers were between 15 and 35, although they had some people over 40.  Education level is also variable, as is income.  Consignment shoppers do so because they enjoy the funkyness of the style, or because they like reusing clothes and reducing waste, or because they like saving money, or a combination of these and possible others. At any rate the only real section of the population I could narrow down was age and sex.  I know from  personal experience that women shop more than men, consignment stores carry more women's clothes, women sell their clothes more, and that women and men between 15 and 35 shop more than people 35+. This was confirmed through interviews.  So I imported census data from the SIS drive and calculated the ratio of females to males that are 15-34 for each DA in Vancouver.  DAs with a ratio of 1 and greater have more women, those with ratios less than 1 have more men. See the Distribution.
  

• Affordable Rent -  Rent is of course important.  Even if all my data pointed to opening a store along English Bay common sense would tell me this would not be feasible.  So I looked up the Royal LePage website and found the price/square foot for commercial spaces currently for rent in Vancouver.  From this I created an interpolated cost surface for Vancouver using Inverse Distance Weighting.  I then overlayed this with a Boolean image of the Commercial and Commercial/Mixed Residential areas in Vancouver from the Vancouver landuse shapefile on the SIS drive. This gave me a lease cost surface for the commercial areas in Vancouver, allowing me to further refine my search.  Now in deciding on what an appropriate rent is I'm a little lost, but feel a middle-of-the-road tactic will suffice.  As long as I'm not paying at the highest end ($70/sqft), but closer to the mean ($25/sqft), I should be okay. See the Interpolated Image.
  

• Transportation -  At first I thought this would be an important aspect of location.  But after talking to store owners I no longer feel it's important enough to include in the analysis. As one owner put it "if there's no other reason for someone to come to your area besides your store, who cares if it's easy to get to on the bus. They won't come".  This brings us back to nearness of other stores. It's more important to be in a good neighbourhood than to be accessible by public transit.  The commercial areas in Vancouver are also all fairly well reached by public transit.

• Safety -  I had not thought of this as an issue to begin with, but one store owner expressed it as a reason she would not operate out of Gastown. At the same time though, she said that her front window had been broken a couple times (on Main street) and that theft was a bit of a problem.  Then talking to a girl working in Gastown she said that theft was a problem anywhere she had worked, and although it was a bit worse in Gastown it wasn't bad enough to make her think opening a business there would be a bad idea.  So although I've still chosen not to include it in my analysis I wanted to include it in my methodology because it is an aspect to this decision. Different people will feel differently about certain areas of the city, and this could then be an important component. 
  


Hypothesis:  Going into this project I am expecting that Gastown will be my most suitable location.  I know from experience that it is near the type of stores I'd like to be by.  I also feel that more affordable commercial property is available there.  Although there are many consignment stores on the west side (along W 4th and W Broadway), I am not expecting to be able to afford to open a business there. The Main Street area will be interesting to see, because of the gentrification.  I would think the rents would be too high, but it is still on the east side, and therefore possibly still affordable.