How has retail sales transformed in Southern Indiana?

Retail in Southern Indiana has gone through a significant transformation in the past 20 years. Several years ago, my students would get a laugh out of my “international” business example. A Cajun from Louisianan would have to drive to Corydon in order to buy crawfish that happened to be imported from China. We need our crawfish fix every now and then, and the Wal Mart in Corydon was the only place I could find my Southern Lobster.

Well, we now know that retail is quite different today. Floyd and Clark counties have landed national chains, and both counties have seen new retail corridors develop over the past 10 years.

The graph below is quite striking. Notice that the “retail dollars by population” line continues to increase for Clark County. This does not necessarily mean that Clark County residents are spending more in retail dollars themselves. We can probably assume that these retail dollars are coming from other counties. We see recent declines in Floyd County, and declines in Crawford and Washington.

Several years ago for my first Economic Outlook, I suggested that Clark County was becoming a retail destination. That was based on my “scientific” analysis of counting license plates at the Bass Pro Shop. Several counting trips revealed a significant number of plates from Kentucky, and the outlying counties of Crawford, Orange, and Washington. When our neighboring Indiana and Kentucky counties visit Bass Pro Shop, they are likely to visit other retail establishments too, and that shows up in the graph below.

One might say that the newly developed Veteran’s Corridor is a mall itself, an open-air mall, where shoppers can drive from one store to the next. Whether you like to shop at Bass Pro Shop or not, the graph below is quite convincing with respect to recent retail patterns in Southern Indiana.

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This information is provided by

Uric Dufrene. 

Uric Dufrene, Ph.D. holds the Sanders Chair in Business in the School of Business at Indiana University Southeast.  He conducts research on local and regional economic trends, and teaches corporate finance at the undergraduate and graduate levels.   He previously served as dean of the School of Business.