By BECKY KISER
Hays Post
“There’s a lot of potential here,” according to Clay Craft, portfolio director of Retail Strategies, Birmingham, Alabama.
That was the tag line on the final slide Craft presented to Hays city commissioners Thursday night in an update from the national firm hired in March 2018 to provide a retail recruitment and retention program for the city.
Craft said he likes to joke the company is the “Match.com of retail.”
“The pitch to locate in a town must be very specific to what that retailer is looking for,” he told the commission. Retail Strategies focuses on recruitment of national retailers which may also help draw smaller businesses to a town. The company is currently in contact with 9,703 retailers, according to Craft.
The 45-minute presentation about Hays was jam-packed with data, information, analytics, and the status of the town’s retail sector.
Commissioners saw a catchment map indicating most shoppers come to Hays from an area to the northwest of the city. The compilation is from mobile data collection.
Tracked in the retail corridor were Walmart Supercenter, Big Creek Crossing, Home Depot, and Hobby Lobby from Nov. 2017 to Nov. 2018.
“Big Creek Crossing has the most spread out area drawing people to Hays,” Craft reported.
“Even more than Walmart?,” asked Vice-Mayor Henry Schwaller, who was surprised.
Craft explained that Walmart has more competition. There are more Walmart stores in the area than there are shopping malls similar to Big Creek Crossing.
Commissioners also learned millennials are driving retail, and mobile platforms are very important in their shopping habits.
Although e-commerce is growing, demographic data from groups Retail Strategies works with finds 78 percent of consumers still prefer “bricks and mortar” shopping – buying in stores. “They like to touch things. They want to want to try on that coat before they buy it.”
Commissioners asked about tweaking the data to answer other questions.
Shaun Musil noted he has a lot of customers from the Scott City area in southwest Kansas visit his downtown business the Paisley Pear and Wine Bistro. “Do you guys have the ability to find out what they’re coming to Hays for?,” Musil asked.
When Musil asks his southwest Kansas customers why they came to Hays, “99 percent of the time it’s because of Fort Hays State University or the hospital.”
Mayor James Meier, a pharmacist who works for HaysMed, wondered how many people are coming to Hays for a doctor’s appointment and then doing their retail shopping. He also works for other pharmacies in towns within the Hays retail trade area.
“It never ceases to amaze me when I ask why somebody why they picked the doctor that they picked, that they pick it based on what other stores they can go to when they go to their doctor’s appointment,” Meier related.
Over the past year, Retail Strategies has been identified potential zones for retail recruitment in Hays.
A map filled with green dots represented “a slice of some of the properties we’ve inventoried. We added a bunch more today and took some away, so it’s a static document of a living, breathing tool we use. We’ve got attributes and information collected on all these properties.”
Craft spoke of just a few properties Retail Strategies is currently working on, including Big Creek Crossing, the former Hastings store, Tebo Village where Pasta Jay’s restaurant closed last month, the site of the former Ambassador Hotel, property the city has optioned to buy at 93 acres at the northeast corner of 27th Street and Commerce Parkway north of Interstate 70, and the former Carlos O’Kelly’s restaurant.
Retailers opened about 14,000 stores in 2018. Craft said 2019 store expansion plans are becoming increasingly food-based with a lot of growth in discount grocery. Specialty food —fast casual and organic grocery are becoming mainstream.
Once all the numbers are crunched, the resulting top four categories for retail recruitment to Hays are restaurants, specialty grocery, apparel, and sporting goods.
“The retail gaps help inform us but it is not the end all be all,” Craft cautioned. “None of this information is end all be all because commercial real estate is so nuanced.”
And that’s why Retail Strategies does three-year contracts with cities, Craft said, with the strategy updated annually.
“Retail is not going away. Retail is complicated and it takes 18 to 36 months to close a deal.”
Hays currently has a one-year contract with Retail Strategies at a cost of $50,000 with the option to renew for two additional years at $45,000 each year.
At the end of Thursday’s work session, City Manager Toby Dougherty requested a 15-minute executive session which included the two representatives of Retail Strategies.
No action was taken.