Mall Traffic Increases 8.6 Percent Since 2002

A Massachusetts consultant told a group gathered at the Embassy Suites in Rogers on May 10 that the number of people shopping at the Northwest Arkansas Mall in Fayetteville had dropped by 12 “percentage points” since 2002.

But Alice Church, manager of the mall, said foot traffic there was actually up 8.6 percent from 2002 to 2004 and is tracking up 1.7 percent so far in 2005.

Christine Urban, president of Urban and Associates Inc. of Sharon, Mass., based her estimate of decline on a survey of 800 adult residents of Benton and Washington counties. Church said the mall uses technology from Chicago-based ShopperTrak to count the exact number of people who walk into the building, so those numbers should be accurate.

ShopperTrak would count a person who walks into the mall, leaves and immediately enters again as two shoppers. But the same counting technology was in place at the mall in 2002, so it’s an apples-to-apples comparison as far as percentage change is concerned.

Urban used “percentage points,” meaning the difference between two percentages, rather than the actual percentage change from 2002 to present. When asked via e-mail, Urban declined to reveal the percentage change for shoppers at the mall as indicated by her study.

Urban said the number of shoppers visiting Scottsdale Center in Rogers increased by 10 percent since 2002, according to an article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Urban is a media consultant hired by the D-G, Northwest Arkansas Times and Benton County Daily Record. Her survey also indicated that more people read the D-G, along with it’s bundled local paper, than read The Morning News of Springdale.