Shelbyville can't have its retail cake and eat it, too

For example: one commenter complains about the lack of retail choices in Shelbyville and wants the city to try to attract bigger stores and restaurants. Then, another commenter complains that the city has allowed too many retailers to locate on North Main Street, generating traffic problems.

Well, I'm afraid you can't have it both ways. Here are some truths related to retail development.

There are limits to what the city or county can do to attract an individual retailer or restaurant. In the case of industries, cities and counties can offer incentive packages and payment-in-lieu-of-tax agreements. But you can't really do that for retailers. It's almost certain that some aspect of the new retailer's product line will compete with one of your existing businesses, and you would be -- in effect -- using that business's taxes to subsidize its competition. That's simply not fair.

A government or chamber of commerce can put together demographic information and make sure that desirable retailers or restaurants know about the community. One former city official was, like me, a big fan of the restaurant chain Steak 'N Shake, and she went so far as to call their corporate offices to try to encourage them to open a restaurant here. (It didn't work.)

City officials also have some say in whether zoning regulations are retail-friendly. But they can't go a whole lot farther.

And speaking of those zoning regulations, there's a balance that has to be drawn. Some of our web site commenters seem to think that the city should stop major retailers from locating on North Main Street due to the traffic problems. That could probably be accomplished through zoning, but it might also make new retailers and restaurants much less likely to come to town, as desired by some of the other commenters. You see, most retailers like locating on high-traffic thoroughfares. Traffic equals potential business. Some chains carefully study state-issued traffic count maps and won't locate at a given site unless it has a certain minimum traffic count. And locating on the north side of Shelbyville puts businesses closer to the rapidly-growing northern portions of the county.

Yes, retail development leads to congestion on North Main Street. But the city doesn't tell individual retail chains where to locate. And if the city were, at this point, to try to shut down retail development on North Main Street, it would be harming property owners who have spent large amounts of money on what they believed at the time to be commercial development sites.

Current and planned road projects, such as widening North Main Street and building the northeastern bypass around the city, may relieve some of the congestion. But to some extent, the traffic and the retailers go hand-in-hand.

The fact of the matter is that for many retail and restaurant chains, there's a particular business model they require for new locations. It has to do with traffic counts, the population within a given radius of the store, the median income of that population, the other competing chains which are already located nearby, and so on.

In the early to mid 1990s, several "big box" retail chains descended on the Nashville market for the first time. It wasn't because the city had recruited them. According to news reports at the time, it was because the Nashville metro area crossed a certain minimum population in the 1990 census that those store chains required as part of their business plan. I want to say that it was 2 million people in Nashville and its ring of adjoining counties. Once that happened, no one had to invite the retailers. They arrived on their own.

One commenter seemed to imply that Shelbyville should be able to attract all of the same retail and restaurant chains that have outlets in Murfreesboro. That's just ridiculous. Murfreesboro is a much larger community, located on an interstate, with a major state university in its midst. They're naturally going to attract a lot of retailers that simply don't build in communities our size.

Every now and then, a rumor goes around that Target is interested in Shelbyville. For years, I have heard otherwise-reasonable people swear up and down that it was a done deal for Target to take over some vacant retail location or to build a new store somewhere in Shelbyville.

But Target doesn't locate in communities our size. Recently, I went looking for information about Target online, and I found a 1991 article saying that Target was testing a new design store for "small markets." But "small markets" as Target defined them in 1991 started with a minimum population of 50,000. Bedford County's 2007 population was about 44,000; right now, it wouldn't even show up on Target's list as a "small market."

Chain retailers don't build new locations based on a wish and a prayer. They build based on a business plan, in locations which they think will generate a profit. Each chain's formula for making these decisions is a little bit different. A town may be large enough to get a McDonald's but not large enough to get a Ruby Tuesday. If a community isn't large enough, or affluent enough, or if the landowners ask too much for prime retail sites, or if zoning regulations keep the most desirable sites out of play, a retailer isn't going to locate in that community. Once a community does meet those conditions, the retailers are likely to show up on their own, without the need for much encouragement.

Bedford County has been growing and will no doubt continue to grow. Perhaps we'll get new spinoff jobs from the VW plant. As we continue to grow, retailers and restaurants will continue to arrive. There may be some needed fine-tuning to make sure we maximize our chances, but many of the factors that influence retail development are out of our immediate control, despite what the commenters seem to believe.

To over-simplify a bit, some of our commenters want the city to roll out the red carpet for new retailers, while other commenters want the city to be more aggressive in telling retailers where they can or cannot locate. In theory, either of those two things is possible. It may not be possible to do both.

-- John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. His home page is lakeneuron.com.