The Great Wall of Dunnes and the Geography of Avoidance

What is it with all the walls recently? At the moment, there is a campaign brewing in Newbridge, Co. Kildare regarding a wall which was erected by Dunnes Stores to cut off access to a recently opened SuperValu next door.

Locals complain that it stops people from moving freely from Dunnes to the centre of the town. In reality, the reason is more commercial. Dunnes recently took the top spot in the Irish grocery market with a 22.7% market share followed closely by SuperValu at 22.5%.

Retailers rely on what is called the Geography of Avoidance. What this really means is that they physically make it difficult for people to shop around. In this case, for a shopper to compare prices they will have to have to spend ten minutes to go right around to the SuperValu store, where as before they could more between the locations in in few minutes. This makes shoppers likely to do all the shopping in one location as the savings would have to be worth more than the effort.

Another example of this is the trend towards bigger and bigger stores in recent years. The bigger the store, the more effort it is to leave the store, cross the vast car park to go to another store to check the prices.

That is one of the reasons why the ShoppingBud app exists, you can compare the prices no matter where you are, regardless of walls.