Although the landscape has drastically transformed over the last decade, retail analytics have not kept pace which is causing some retailers to close the wrong store locations. McKinsey reports that many retailers rely on “four-wall economics” to assess store performance when they should be using consumer behavior insights extracted from location data with spatial analysis. And where McKinsey finds geospatial analytics most valuable is in “helping retailers make better decisions about expanding or contracting their store network.”

When Amazon announced its acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.1 billion dollars last year analysts speculated on what impact the “Amazon Effect” would have on grocery retail. However, Bloomberg reports that the merger’s biggest impact was in the number of mergers and partnerships among competitors reacting to the news. The first half of 2018 saw record breaking merger and acquisition activity with U.S. based deals valued at an astounding $1.03 trillion dollars.

Supply chains are a critical, and often unnoticed, part of our everyday lives. Almost everything that we purchase in a store comes to us as a part of a supply chain and managing these networks is a complex and ever evolving task.

We are making so many new measures available through the Data Observatory that we just had to highlight some interesting ones. 1. US population with a Master’s Degree