A hypermarket site selection model using the grey multi-objective decision method

As the retailing market has become more and more competitive, the selection of an attractive location plays a critical role in the performance of retail outlets. Due to their huge investment and operation costs, potential locations must go through a series of careful evaluations before deciding on the final site. Previous studies on the evaluation of site selection have adopted the multiplicative competitive interaction (MCI) model to decide the most preferred locations. The MCI model has been critiqued as relying too much on the opinions of potential customers and might need to be offset by the opinions of marketing experts. This article presents an alternative evaluation procedure to help retailers, especially hypermarketers, make a location decision by using the grey multi-objective decision method. The methodology is applied to a leading marketer in Taiwan and the results indicate that this model provides a significantly different approach from the MCI model.