Two Centers of Attraction

As I was thinking about my very clever post from last week, I drove past a golf course. Now, its hard to imagine the actual course, as we are still under about 2-3 feet of snow, but I instantly had visions of golf ball maps - arcs gracefully converging to the hole. My thoughts drifted to distance decay and what map style would provide an understanding of where the troubled places for this particular hole are...

But wait - a golf course is different since it actually has 2 centers of attraction - the hole and the tee. The beginning and the end have obviously high levels of activity. Granted, the tee off area is bigger, with options for moving somewhat around - and a segmented launch pad by gender, but, at is purest form - it has a single beginning and a single end.

My thoughts then drifted to another sport with dual centers of attraction - basketball with 2 hoops (and I have all 4 Final Fours in my bracket too!). Baseball has 2 - a pitcher's mound and the batter's box, but then it gets complex with the outfield.

Golf is rather analogous to retail geography. The store is the obvious center of attraction - studied as such for nearly a century. It is typically within another center of attraction - the city, which has been studied for centuries. But the other center of attraction is where the customer lives.

Blocks and block groups simplify the customer center - very similar to the golf tee off area. Direct shopping trips may be as rare as the the hole-in-one, since customers may make a handful of stops - picking up friends, stopping by the post office, getting gas, picking up dry cleaning, etc. on the way to the ultimate destination. And once we consider the trip back, we leave golf's analogy and jump into basketball.

I'm not a golf fan, so as far as I know, this process has a well formulated analytical basis. After all, golf video games have to deal somewhat with this collection of vectors. But that is essentially what it is, a collection of vectors starting in one place ending in another. To analyze this, I'd try graph theory - a visual mathematics to explain space, vectors, and movement. Graph theory can provide solutions to the traveling salesman and the postal delivery problem, which have some similarity for our shopping trip vectors.

The result would probably end up with a gravity model subsitute, but the analytical focus would be the actual travel vectors rather than the ultimate destination's attractive measure (the Mi and Mj in the Wiki link). Or perhaps it would be a more accurate distance (Dij) value.

But the results would have another critical use - you should be able to predict where the vectors pause on the way to the destination. I'm sure golf fans can tell you where the golf balls are typically going to be on a 3 shot strategy on Augusta's 16th green. So, where would you put a store - using what business plan - with a 3 vector strategy with folks going from this neighborhood/town to a mall?

I think the billboard people do something like this for placing ads on the way to and from work. I've also heard that high traffic stores - like Walgreens/CVS or fast food places - do something like this too. Although, they'd probably be better off with decent traffic counts (and I know they use that).

So, how good is your short game? In golf that is the transition from the tee off to the putting green. In real estate, could it be what high traffic companies are doing? If not, is this an opportunity?