What is Retail Points?
Our vision when we first released this data set in 2014 was to collate, maintain and deliver a structured one stop shop file, unintentional but suitable pun, of the UK grocery market by collating supermarket and convenience store locations including full addresses with accurate rooftop coordinates. The concept still to this day is to publish an industry acknowledged product without restrictions that is utilised by retailers, interested parties and the public. The continual success of our goal has allowed us to enhance and expand the list of retailers and fascia we track. We haven’t seen this many retailers in one place since the #Aldi30thBirthdayParty in 2020.
Convenience - Aldi Local, Amazon Fresh, Asda Express, Asda On the Move, Budgens, Co-op, Jacks, Little Waitrose, M&S Food to Go, Morrisons Daily, Sainsbury’s Local, Tesco Express, Tesco Metro
Discounters - Aldi, Lidl
Freezer Centres - Cooltrader, Farmfoods, Heron, Iceland, The Food Warehouse
Petrol Forecourt - Asda PFS**, Co-op Food PFS**, Little Waitrose Shell, M&S BP, Morrisons Daily, Tesco Esso Express
Specialist - Booths, Marks & Spencer, Planet Organic, Waitrose, Whole Foods Market
Symbol Groups - Spar
Traditional - Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose
Travel - M&S MSA*, M&S Travel Simply Food, Waitrose MSA*
Wholesaler - Costco, Makro
Other - Asda Living, Dunnes, M&S Home; Hospital; Outlet, Morrisons Home and Nutmeg
*MSA: Motorway Service Area
**PFS: Petrol Filling Station
The UK grocery landscape has changed considerably since our first version of this data set and the disputable categorisation of the fascia above displays the fluidity of how people now shop. Noting the repetitive mention of retailers in our grouping which demonstrates the variety of opportunities available to attract customers in this sector.
How do we track?
Each quarter Geolytix updates Retail Points to capture store openings and closures that have occurred between releases to ensure we represent an accurate grocery environment. We are fortunate to have relationships with some of the retailers we include in the data who kindly share their store lists with us. Part of the attraction of this product is that it does not contain commercially sensitive attributes but provides a complete source of publicly available information. Social media, google alerts, news articles, store finders and welcomed input from our users provide the rest. We then manually rooftop every store to give accurate coordinates. Opening dates are provided where we have been able to source them from the public record, these tend to be more skewed towards recent years since we started tracking supermarket locations. The size bands are assigned based on a combination of inputs including Valuation Office Agency (VOA), planning applications, news articles and opening hours.
If you work for a retailer we track who don’t currently share their store list we would appreciate you considering contributing to this established data set which has proved invaluable. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) who work to promote competition to benefit consumers recognise Retail Points as a definitive and reputable source of information to support their analysis required for certain investigations. There is great value in attributes such as opening date and size bands and we understand the reservations retailers have in supplying these. Hopefully the recognised success and beneficial nature of having a structured source with the latest information encourages users to help us permeate the gaps.
Geolytix would like to think one day we could bring together that collaborative effort so if you would be willing to contribute a store list or additional attributes please let us know, without everyone being prepared to share this may not be possible. Our ultimate vision is for all users to enrich the product together with us to ensure we can maintain delivering this valuable data regularly.
The Evolution of Retail Points
Where can I access the data?
Each quarter we publish a blog and shout on our social media about the latest update which you can download from here. For the full list of retailers we track and attribute definitions see the user guide here. To reiterate this is released as fully open data which you can do with it as you please, of course if you are able to acknowledge us that would be greatly appreciated.
We love seeing and hearing about how the data is being used so please do tag us on Twitter and LinkedIn: @geolytix
Blog first published January 2021. Updated February 2023.
Title Image: Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
