Before COVID-19, we were quite European city-hoppers. Visiting a museum, doing some shopping and enjoying good food and drinks, all in a city hundreds of miles away. However, right now we can only dream about it…
What you will probably recognize from your previous city trips, is that you often come across a lot of well-known shops in the main shopping streets (High Streets). This blog is about these High Streets. To what extent do they resemble each other in the 21 countries where Locatus collects data? Which chains dominate? This Top 100 covers the main streets in the main 62 cities in these 21 countries.
What criteria did we use for this Top 100?
- It is a top 100 of chain stores. Our definition of a retail chain is an organization with seven or more points of sale worldwide (stores, restaurants, banks or hotels) under one ownership. With this definition we have almost 5.000 retail chains in our European dataset. Most of them are national chains. These chains are active in just one or two countries. This brings us to the next criterion:
- The Top 100 focusses on international chains. Therefore chains with a presence in just one or two countries are not listed in this Top 100. The result is a list of 800 retail chains with an outlet in 3 or more countries.
- The listing describes the High Street retail. Only outlets in the inner cities of the major 62 European retail destinations are used for this top 100. Therefore, IKEA for example takes position 95 in the floor space ranking with just 8.541 m². The total floorspace of IKEA in Europe is much more, but all out-of-town IKEA’s are not in this listing.
- These are the 62 most important cities in 21 countries. On this overview list you can see which cities are part of our European dataset. For example, only the largest cities in the Netherlands and Belgium are included, even though we have data for all cities.
Which retail chains dominate in the Top 100?
The top 10 of the number of outlets is dominated by Food and Beverage (Starbucks, McDonald’s, Subway and Burger King) and Clothing stores (H&M, Zara, Calzedonia and Mango). The top 10 in floor space is dominated by Clothing and Department stores.
Only 3 of all chains (H&M, Zara and McDonald’s) are present in the highstreets of all 21 countries in our database. Another three (Starbucks, Burger King and Pandora) are present in 20 of the 21 countries. Of these chains, Zara is the only chain present in all 62 cities with a total of 131 outlets.
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For more information about our European database you can contact our sales department (+31 (0) 348 490 290).
