Retail co-location ranking system
The Woodfine co-location methodology assigns each cluster's tier through binary predicate gates, not a composite score — no cluster earns a tier by accumulating points toward a threshold. This article covers the mechanics behind those gates: how a cluster's catchment position is measured against its national peers, how competing clusters are compared for overlap, and how clusters are ordered once ranked. The gate definitions themselves — which combination of tests each tier requires — are set out in the catchment ranking methodology; the tier labels are described in tier nomenclature.
Country-relative ranking
A cluster's tier depends on where it stands against every other cluster in its own country, not against a fixed global threshold. Each cluster is ranked against its national peers on measures of catchment population and consumer spend. Ranking within-country, rather than against one global bar, keeps a smaller market's structure intact: a nationally significant cluster in a small country is read against its own national field, not swamped by the sheer scale of a larger one. The percentile axes and the calculation behind them are planned for publication at gis.woodfinegroup.com.
Catchment is measured across two distance bands — a primary zone within 35 km of the cluster and a secondary zone between 35 km and 150 km — per the distance-band methodology. Spend estimates draw on national household-spending surveys.
These thresholds are intentionally coarse. The system is built to separate nationally significant clusters from local nodes, not to finely rank clusters against one another within a tier.
The overlap test
A cluster is only credited for its tier when it is not dominated by a stronger neighbour nearby. Overlap between neighbouring clusters is measured by a geometric test over a fixed radius around each cluster: the closer two clusters sit, the higher the measured overlap, and clusters far enough apart are treated as spatially independent. A cluster that substantially overlaps a stronger cluster is held below the tier its composition and catchment would otherwise earn. Regional carries the strictest overlap limit of any tier, per the gate definitions. The overlap measure and its radius are planned for publication at gis.woodfinegroup.com.
Ordering within a tier
Clusters that share a tier and a country are ordered by a fixed sequence of criteria, ending in a tiebreak that cannot produce a tie. The ordering is therefore fully deterministic: the same data returns the same order on every run, so a ranking cited in one review can be reproduced in the next. The ordering criteria and tiebreak sequence are planned for publication at gis.woodfinegroup.com.
Data Sources
Map and location data © OpenStreetMap contributors / ODbL.
See also
- Retail co-location methodology
- Retail co-location intelligence — overview
- Composition-based catchment ranking methodology
References
- Big-box store — Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-14
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