Human Geo 12.1-12.2 Questions Flashcards
In what way is the distinction among services not absolute?
Individual consumers use business services (like banks and lawyers), and businesses use consumer services (like buying stationary and staying in hotels), but the types of services have different distributions and their locations are influenced by different factors.
How are services distributed?
Their distribution opposite that of primary sector workers. If services were merely located where people lived, China and India would have the most (instead of the US). Services cluster in developed places because more people who can buy services live there, and cities offer a larger scale of services because more customers reside there. Locating a service calls for more precise skills than locating a factory, because optimal locations may be at very specific places (like a street corner).
What has the growth of US employment been in?
Services (and declining in primary and secondary sector activities). With business services, jobs expanded the most rapidly in professional services and more slowly in finance and transportation services (due to improved efficiency; fewer people needed to run trains and answer phones). With consumer services, the most rapid increase has been in the provision of health care, education, entertainment, and recreation.
Why must the range of a service be determined from the radius of a circle that is irregualrly shaped?
Because people tend to go to the nearest available service. The irregular circle takes in the territory for which the proposed site is closer than competitors. Most people think of distance in terms of time rather than miles, so if the range of a good/service is expressed in travel time, then the irregular circle must acknowledge that time travel varies with road conditions (expressway vs city streets).
What is an example of how potential customers inside the range are counted depending on the product?
Movie theaters attract younger people; chiropractors attract older folks.
2. Poorer people are drawn to thrift stores, wealthier to department stores
3. Amusement parks attract families; nightclubs appeal to singles.
-Shopping malls, department stores, and supermarkets may only count higher-income people. A large retailer has many locations to choose from regarding building sites. The cost of construction must be justified by sales.
What is the geometry of market areas?
Geographers use hexagons to represent market areas in central place theory because they nest without gaps (something circles don’t do) and the variation of distance from the center isn’t as large as with squares.
How does rank-size distribution have an impact on the quality of life for a country’s inhabitants?
In the US, the society is sufficiently wealthy to justify the provision of goods/services to consumers, but primate cities in LDCs indicates there isn’t enough wealth in the society to pay for a full variety of services, and there’s a hardship for people who must travel long distances to reach an urban settlement with shops, hospitals, and other services.
Explain market areas in MDCs:
Market ares in an MDC are a series of hexagons of various sizes, unless interrupted by physical features. They have many small settlements with small thresholds/ranges, and far fewer large settlements. 4 levels of market area: hamlet, village, town, & city are overlapping hexagons that form a nesting pattern.
What’s an example of a regular pattern of settlements in the US
North-central North Dakota is an example of this. Minot, the largest city (with 48,000 inhabitants), is surrounded by 13 small towns (1,000-3,000 people), 29 villages (100-999 people), and 34 hamlets (less than 100 people). Only consumer services with small thresholds, ranges, and market areas are in small settlements (with too few people), and Minot is the only settlement in that part of ND that has a Walmart.
Major US consumer services employ geographers to determine the best location for new stores, who use range and threshold to determine profitability. How (4)?
- Define the market area: Usually ZIP codes where most customers live.
- Estimate the range: Based on ZIP codes of credit-card customers. Family dollar has a 15 minute range, and Target has 30 minutes.
- Estimate the threshold: It varies, but is 25,000 for Family Dollar and 100,000 for Target. Ppl are only counted if they have sufficient income.
- Predict the market share (with competitors): Predicted through the analog method, where they identify 1 or more existing stores in locations comparable to the proposed location, then apply the market share of those stores to the proposed new store.
Descrbe some other characteristics of periodic markets:
In urban areas, periodic markets offer fresh food from the countryside. Many vendors are mobile (trucks), others operate only a few times a year, and others are individuals who can only produce small amounts of food/crafts. Frequency of periodic markets varies by culture (once or twice a week in the US, in different towns every day in Europe), and they may follow other patterns, like the lunar cycle.
How have rapidly expanding sharing services challenged the traditional classification of services btween consumer and business?
Ride sharing services (Uber) compete with taxis (using a phone call/flagging vs. app to summon), and Uber claims that its drivers are independent one-person businesses (but some say they’re employees). This matters because it’s the ridesharing company’s responsibility to screen, train, and insure them (only if they’re employees).
What are 3 reasons why Airbnb is a consumer service?
- It competes with hotels (which are clearly consumer services)
- It offers nightly rentals, and doesn’t have leases (unlike regular residential rental units)
- In some communities, Airbnb units cause a reduction in availability of long-term rentals, especially for lower-income people.
What are 3 reasons why Airbnb is a business service?
- Its employees are primarily computer operators (business services).
- People access Airbnb through their electronic devices.
- The owners of the rented rooms and homes aren’t Airbnb employees, nor are the people who might clean and repair the rooms and homes.
