There is enough demand within a three-mile radius of the train station for existing retail and planned retail, according to the Rahway Survey. Community Insights, which was commissioned by the Rahway Center Partnership, examined 63 separate categories of retail for the survey.
The report found sustainable demand for the following retail categories:
- Apparel and accessories, including children’s clothing, clothing accessories, footwear and jewelry;
- Entertainment, especially live theater and night clubs;
- Eating and drinking places
- Food and beverages; and,
- Specialty retail, such as arts and crafts, gifts, office supplies, newsstands, and toys, games and hobbies.
There is an oversupply of furniture and grocery stores in the ZIP code area, but especially within the primary trade area (3-mile radius). [To avoid the risk of boring you here, I placed definitions and statistics of the “trade areas” at the end of this post; it’ll probably be handy for several future posts about survey results.]
There also is excess demand for women’s clothing, shoes, jewelry, musical in
struments, florists, office supplies and recorded music, among others. However, the figures don’t reflect the presence of Woodbridge Center, which is only a half-mile outside the 3-mile radius. Despite $14 million in unmet demand for clothing stores — particularly women’s clothing and clothing accessories — the report suggests any new stores should be the type that do not directly compete against those present in the mall.
Consumers also expressed a preference for a variety of retail stores, including a grocery store, bakery, clothing stores, a bookstore, cards and gifts, and home decor.
The survey concluded that the primary trade area is a 3-mile radius from the train station that includes 135,000 people in 49,000 households and an average household income of $75,000. Consumer demand within that area exceeds $2.2 billion annually.
In the spirit of Friday’s The Taste event, tomorrow’s post will deal with the demand specifically for restaurants (you won’t want to miss it). See you there!
Previous Rahway Survey posts:
Restaurants would draw us downtown (among other things)
Rahway Survey results are in
*****
The Rahway Survey examined consumers and supply and demand for the ZIP code 07065, along with a primary trade area (3-mile radius around the train station) and a secondary trade area (5-mile radius).
About 69 percent of consumers in Rahway originate from the 07065 ZIP code area, which contains about 10,000 people who spend $456 million annually on retail goods and services. More than 75 percent of all shoppers originate within the primary trade area, which is home to 75,000 consumers, and 83 percent from the secondary trade area, which has more than 363,000 consumers.
To the person at Original Nile who dropped off some menus in the lobby, THANKS!
There is an oversupply of grocery stores?? I wonder how they came up with that idea. Isn’t that one of the major gripes on this blog among Rahway residents?
Yeah, I didn’t understand that either, monkeypilot.They want to say Rahway will be the new Hoboken but besides that tiny market on Cherry Street, there is no other place to go grocery shopping for people that have no car and can’t drive to other towns or to Route 1/9. If a family wants the suburban life of having to drive everywhere, they aren’t going to move to Rahway.
Also, with the Woodbridge Mall and Menlo Park Mall so close to go browse/buy through a variety of branded clothes, I think people are more likely to go downtown to go to a toy store with their kids, a book store, a gift store, a restaurant, bakery, cafe, ice cream parlor, and maybe even shoes, than to go because they need an outfit for next month’s event.
Who has the money now to shop any ways? stock market crash,depression(oh a nicer way to say it DEEP RECESSION) state and gov helping out the banks and stockmarket with taxpayers money. which we will have to pay. not for a few years any of this will probally come to fruit and forget about the small buisness now with obama in there.
Luis is absolutely right. Friends from NYC won’t consider moving out to an area like this until they can live their daily life without a car. So a real, grown-up, well-stocked grocery store has to be priority one.
It would be great to expand the availability of basic foodstuffs downtown, but please, please, don’t plunk a big suburban supermarket and its enormous asphalt parking lot full of orphan shopping carts and blowing plastic bags downtown. Hoboken used to have a Shop-Rite with limited parking, and downtown Jersey City allowed a Pathmark and Shop-Rite only during the days when land there was cheap and before the yuppies arrived.