Traditional retail markets have long been the center for urban vitality, yet they have been under threat of advancing superstores run by corporate retailers. Studies have attempted to identify the competitiveness of the markets, but empirical evidence is not sufficient for presenting which factors contribute to the maintenance of a traditional market's economic vitality. In South Korea, urban policies have been directed to revitalizing the markets, but their effectiveness has been questioned. This study aims to fill this void by examining traditional markets in Seoul with multiple regression on (1) the revenue and (2) the volume of customers and with negative binomial regression on (3) the popularity measured by the number of blog posts on the markets. Using a comprehensive set of variables, this paper finds that investments in physical infrastructure (p < 0.000) and organizational/operational capacities (p < 0.008 and p < 0.094) make a significant contribution to the economic vitality. Among product categories, the ratios of perishable food stores were found to be significant (p < 0.000) as well as those of food shops and vendors (p < 0.030). On the other hand, extending convenient facilities and anchor stores would reduce the revenue in the short term. In addition, traditional markets that are recognized as popular destinations may not necessarily be profitable. In this vein, attention should be paid to this mismatch when a strategy is deliberated to transform a market into a tourist attraction.
Using texts from online blogs, this study aimed to analyze the effect of perceived characteristics of a place in the virtual space and their influence on its economic performance. Specifically, this study analyzed old retail space (traditional markets) in Seoul by empirically examining the relationship among the perceived characteristics, economic performances, and the physical and operative conditions of the markets' facilities. The perceived characteristics by the bloggers were analyzed by the text-mining of the blog posts. Next, the associations among the multiple factors including the perceived characteristics, economic measures, were analyzed by PLS-SEM. Three types of characteristics were found from the texts: (a) value shopping, (b) novelty & food, and (c) affective sentiments. Among them, novelty & food have significant positive effects on annual sales growth and the vacancy reduction rates of the markets. The improved physical condition also had a positive direct effect on annual sales growth, which can be partially explained by its positive mediating effects on Novelty & Food. The operating condition had no significant relationship with the perceived 1922 | YI and GIM 1 | INTRODUCTION The traditional retail markets are a type of old urban retail facilities in South Korea. These markets are comprised of a collection of one hundred to a few thousand "brick-and-mortar" stores run by small local business owners. Most of them were built prior to 1980 when the country had been under the rapid urbanization and modernization process after the Korean War. 1 The traditional markets 2 saw their heydays over the 1970s to 1980s 3 ; however, their overall share in the retail industry and their sales figures have declined dramatically since the late 1990s. The decline in annual sales accompanied the deteriorating physical conditions of the establishments in urban areas. According to the statistics, the markets' annual sales decreased by 40% between 2000 and 2010, while during the same period, the sales outcomes for the corporate-owned marts, the large-scale modernized superstores, has doubled (Figure 1). Such structural change in the retail industry was initiated by the late 1990s financial crisis and the 1996 complete opening of the domestic market (Yi, 2016), a policy designed favorable for the entry of domestic and foreign corporate retailers into the downtown fabric, where the scale of any retail businesses was regulated by law. Prior to these changes in the retail industry, Korean consumers spent more in traditional markets than in modernized grocery stores (Yi, 2016). As a result, the urgency to protect small business owners including local businesses and the traditional markets emerged accompanying a series of persistent protests followed by increased unemployment for the merchants and the shop owners at the markets. In South Korea, the portion of retail business owners comprises 25.9% of all employments (2015); small business owners are 93.7% of all businesses. The number of traditional markets was 1,723 in So...
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