By Jim Simmons and Shizue Kamikihara

This paper continues the interest of the CSCA in location strategy as the sequence of sites selected by various commercial format or brand names.  The first comprehensive study examined location strategies in aggregate and identified the number of formats in Canada and their spatial scale of operation.  Subsequent papers explored the location of major retailers across the country.  Other studies have investigated the variable penetration of commercial formats into smaller centres in Western Canada and into various kinds of commercial polygons within the Greater Toronto Area.  This paper extends these concerns into a region that is relatively unfamiliar to many Canadian location analysts: the province of Quebec.  We will describe the Quebec market, and the location choices that it provides; and track the location strategies of those commercial formats that are distinctively Quebecois.

The database and procedures used in this study are the same as those used in previous regional studies.  The store data comes from various telephone and business directories, and the format outlets are identified by means of their brand names.  The stores are then assigned to the various urban markets and metropolitan polygons that have been previously identified, using postal codes.  This permits evaluation of location choices for each format.