City analytics staff presented a multi‑year review of retail visitation for the East Regional Shopping Area — a boundary that the Department of Commerce and city analysts defined to include Schulin Crossing, Home Depot, Walmart, Sam's Club, Target and other big‑box retailers.

Shana, the city’s director of analytics, said the area recorded about 7.1 million visits in 2024, a 9% increase since 2018, and about 400,000 unique visitors — up roughly 12.9% over the same period. "We had 7,100,000 visitors to that area, which is up 9% from 2018," she said.

Why it matters: the expanded boundary aligns Garden City’s retail geography with comparable regional shopping areas and gives planners a more apples‑to‑apples metric for recruiting and impact forecasting tied to the STAR Bond and other projects.

Key findings: staff said visits from outside Finney County totaled nearly 2.9 million in 2024 (up about 10% from 2018). Garden City accounted for roughly 3.9 million visits, an increase of 7.7% from 2018, which staff said aligns with a 1.28% annual growth assumption they've used in projection models.

Measurement caveats: Shana explained the city uses a third‑party mobile‑phone‑location vendor (Placer/Placester) and cautioned the method has systematic undercounts for some event types. She said the vendor acknowledges it does not reliably track children's phones and that communities with higher proportions of recent refugees or migrants — who may have lower cellphone adoption or different device usage patterns — see undercounts for free, family‑oriented events such as summer reading or cultural festivals.

"When we have a refugee and migrant population that probably has a slower adoption of cell phones, we probably are getting a little bit less people there," Shana said, and staff are working with the vendor to calibrate counts against local counters (for example, library turnstile/day‑of counts) and develop scale factors for events where undercounting occurs.

Other context: staff noted that outside‑of‑county visits have grown as a share of overall traffic (about 45% in 2018 to 55% most recently for people living more than 100 miles away, used as a proxy for out‑of‑state visitors). They also discussed the difference between physical dollars collected by a national chain and the local economic spin from jobs and wages generated by stores located in the community.

Ending: staff will continue to refine boundaries and calibration with the vendor, and will use the baseline to measure future projects including STAR Bond‑linked attractions and sports tourism.