Abstract

College town retailers face specific challenges given their unique context. Our study contributes to research on retailing by exploring the college town context to generate new insights while also explicating the impact of store-university distance and commuting multimodality. Our research questions are: (1) how does store-university distance moderate the relationship between university foot traffic and retailer foot traffic? (2) How does university foot traffic interact with multimodal commuting in affecting retailer foot traffic? (3) What moderating effects did changes in the containment and health responses during the COVID-19 pandemic exert upon these relationships? Using foot traffic data from 157 Walmart and Target stores in 38 college towns from 2018-2020, our study indicates that university foot traffic has a positive impact on store visits. Moreover, the positive effect is weakened as the store to university distance increases but is strengthened with greater commuting multimodality. In addition, we find that the intensity of pandemic related containment and health measures amplifies both the negative effect exerted by the distance between the store and university and the positive effect exerted by commuting multimodality upon the positive correlation between university visits and store visits. This research provides information that can be utilized by government officials and retail managers to enhance consumer accessibility to retail stores in college towns and to inform strategies to respond and recover from a pandemic such as COVID-19.