ABSTRACT
So far we have considered an essentially static pattern of retail establishments. Yet in the long run both the real income of the community and sales productivity in retailing tend to rise, so that the relative number of shops selling necessary goods tends to fall and the relative number of shops selling luxuries tends to increase. Ford (1935, 1936) has shown that as a result of these conflicting trends over the period 1901–31 the number of shops relative to population in twelve British towns declined slightly. Similarly from 1950 to 1966, when these divergent trends are measurable from British census data, the total number of retail establishments in Britain continued to decline slowly. Similar trends are evident in almost all Western countries (cf. e.g. Dunn, 1962).
