The definition that matters
Cannibalization is the share of a new store's catchment population already reachable from stores you operate. It is not a survey question and it is not a sentiment. It is set arithmetic on two catchments.
The signature to look for
If average unit volume is flat while unit count grows, and the company describes its openings as infill, new units are very likely drawing on catchments the existing estate already served. That pattern is visible in public disclosure before it is visible in comparable sales.
How to compute it
- Route each store's catchment at the drive time you actually underwrite.
- Union the existing estate's catchments.
- For a candidate, compute the population inside its catchment and outside the union. That is the incremental reach.
- The rest is cannibalized, and it is a number, not an opinion.
Narrative Geo does not sample. Every trade area is routed on the actual road network with OSRM, against full Census/ACS population and a maintained POI set. The drive-time matrix is precomputed at 1.08 billion rows, so a national query across a 20,000-store chain returns in seconds rather than being metered per location.