Retail trade
The share of jobs within commuting reach of a tract that are in retail trade, and how that share has moved over five years.
On this page
Of all the jobs within commuting reach of a tract, the share that are in retail trade. This is a measure of what kind of work is nearby rather than how much of it there is.
The Census Bureau defines the sector as comprising "establishments primarily engaged in retailing merchandise, generally without transformation, and rendering services incidental to the sale of merchandise," and describes retailing as "the final step in the distribution of merchandise." Retail stores "are fixed point-of-sale locations, located and designed to attract a high volume of walk-in customers," though the definition also covers retailers who reach customers "with methods other than, or in addition to, physical stores, such as Internet websites," catalogs, and vending machines (2022 NAICS Manual).
That phrase — designed to attract walk-in customers — is what makes this share useful beyond employment. Retail workplaces follow shoppers, so a high retail share marks a place that functions as a destination for consumer spending: a main street, a commercial strip, a mall catchment. It says less about local resident income than about where the surrounding population goes to buy things. Note also that every job with positive earnings in the reference period counts once regardless of hours worked, so a sector share does not distinguish full-time from part-time positions.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Jobs are counted where the work is located, not where the worker lives.
The Census Bureau protects employer confidentiality before publication. The disclosure limitation applied to "the workplace component of LODES uses employer-level input noise infusion" (McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30), so a published value for one small area is perturbed relative to the underlying count.
Coverage is jobs subject to state unemployment insurance, plus federal workers from 2010 onward (OnTheMap Data Overview). A job counts if the worker had positive earnings in the reference quarter and in the quarter before it, which is a measure taken at a single point in the year rather than an annual average.
Two gaps carry through from the published files: Alaska has no workplace data after 2016 and Michigan none after 2021. Tracts there carry no value rather than a zero.
The twenty sector shares sum to one, so a falling retail share can reflect retail losses or growth elsewhere.
Birdseye derives these shares from the sector job counts the Census Bureau publishes; the shares themselves are not a published series.
References#
- 12022 NAICS Manualhttps://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
- 2McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-30.pdf
- 3OnTheMap Data Overviewhttps://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/help/onthemap/OnTheMapDataOverview.pdf