The city of Shreveport retained the services of Birmingham, Alabama-based Retail Strategies, in July, to guide it in luring new retail and restaurant businesses. Retail Strategies is a combination real estate and consulting company that helps municipalities understand the real estate side of retail.
Shreveport Economic Development Director Bill Sabo traveled to Birmingham to hear their findings. He came back with a list of retailers to call and direction on how to get the right information to the right people.
“They want to know ‘let’s plot a property. What’s the traffic count? What’s the demos? What’s the square footage to the foot, because there’s a difference between paying for 2100 square feet and 2193 square feet.”
“What I also learned is how important signage is, how important how their store faces, what their parking pad needs to be.”
City of Shreveport Economic Development Executive Director Bill Sabo, pointing to opportunities identified by Retail Strategies data.
“Traffic flow is very important. If you’re a coffee shop, you want to be on the a.m. side of the street where people are going to work, not on the p.m. when they’re coming home.
Equally important are the things not to waste time on. “They don’t care about your festivals. They don’t care about your airport. They don’t care that you get a big tournament in here,” he said.
Where the money comes from
Sabo was surprised with one eye-popping statistic—-30% of the retail sales in Shreveport come from outside Shreveport.
“We are a hub,” he stated. He is adamant that the city needs to start thinking this way.
He said that though Shreveport’s population is roughly 187,000, when you consider shoppers coming into the city and total retail sales, the area has the buying power of a metro area of 500,000.
The rendering of an updated grocery center.
Courtesy Walmart
A focus on north Shreveport
Retail Strategies was given a specific mission and a map: they were told to dig into the demographics and potential opportunities from the Highland neighborhood to Sunset Acres to Pines Road and then north, underserved areas that include grocery store deserts and limited retail.
The so-called “trade area” also includes most of north Caddo Parish, because residents who live in Belcher, Gilliam, and other north Caddo towns come into Shreveport to shop.
He said the data showed significant “leakage”—money that could be spent in north Shreveport but was going elsewhere.
In north Shreveport, he said, there is $12 million in leakage on groceries, in the trade area as a whole, it jumps to $55 million. Those are dollars now being spent in Bossier or online, or in any part of Shreveport outside that north Shreveport trade area.
In addition, he said, is a $200 million ‘opportunity gap’ – a number that includes both leakage and money that is not spent in the northern trade area simply because there is no place to spend it.
Sabo admits it is a lot of numbers and a lot of opportunity.
Customers in the check out line at Albertson’s at 105 E Southfield Rd. in Shreveport on Wed., Nov. 6, 2024.
He said those numbers point to a need for more retail, grocery and restaurant options. He is asking the Greater Shreveport Chamber of Commerce and the African-American Chamber of Commerce to get the word out to existing small businesses to consider an expansion into north Shreveport.
He has already begun working to put together a list of locations that will be attractive to the 20 national site selectors who are expecting to hear from him. When he gets them on the phone, the conversation will be short, and hopefully, productive.
“I have something you might be interested in. It is here. It’s this square footage. It has this traffic count. And here’s a map.’ Boom. You get on the radar knowing that this is a marathon.”
Sabo said nothing will happen immediately. Most are two-to-three year processes, for some, it is more.
“The truth of it is, just like any major business, they are budgeting a year out. So right now, 2026 is done.”
“We really have numbers better than probably many, many areas. We’ve just not been able to articulate it, and now we have the ability to say, ‘Here’s where you should be, and this is the type of demographic that fits your company.’”
