Unraveling Urban Retail Realities: Assessing Revenue Shifts and Policy Effects in Seoul, South Korea, Pre- and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The post-2020 revenue trends in Seoul’s retail areas, influenced by government policies to curb the epidemic, exhibit diverse impacts across regions. Progressing through three stages—imposing gathering restrictions, easing business limits with reinforced movement constraints, and relaxing epidemic control—the measures, while uniformly applied, yield varied effects based on retail area characteristics. Using Dynamic Time Warping Clustering, this study assessed 1637 Seoul retail areas over 45 months, categorizing revenue changes into highly grown, grown, recovered, and stagnated types. Areas with increased pre-pandemic revenue displayed lower F&B sector proportions, higher sales/experiential sector proportions, and increased spending by 30s/corporate entities. These areas were characterized by lower-income residents and reduced accessibility to public facilities. Conversely, areas with high 20s consumption, lower corporate demand, and proximity to crowd-pulling facilities exhibited lower revenue recovery resilience. The study emphasizes the need for effective urban spatial management to facilitate the recovery of elastic retail area amid mobility and interaction constraints, advocating for fine-tuned measures to minimize pandemic-induced economic impacts on urban retail areas.