Stall Economy: The Value of Mobility in Retail on Wheels

Selling products in public spaces with wheeled vending stalls can potentially become ubiquitous in our future cities. Transition into such a “stall economy” paradigm is being spurred by the rapidly advancing self-driving technologies. In “Stall Economy: The Value of Mobility in Retail on Wheels,” Cao and Qi provide models, theory, and insights of spatial queueing systems, in which one server moves around to meet mobile customers and in which the “last 100 meters” are expensive. They derive the dependence of customer waiting and stall repositioning on two key decisions: the service zone size and the walking distance imposed on customers to meet a stall. They also propose a stylized joint truck-stall routing model to capture the inventory replenishment operations. They find that the stall economy potentially profits more than stationary retail, not only because of the mobility of stalls for providing proximity to customers but also, because of its operational flexibilities that allow for avoiding the “last 100 meters” and pooling demands.