Economics 201: same shops on the same street?

From 201009 Saudi scenes

In the town of Rahima, near the central fish market, is a street we call Chicken Street. Literally fifteen shops in a row (you see the middle 5 pictured above) sell chicken. In our standard idea of economics, this appears to be inefficient and unprofitable -- we feel that if the poulterers all dispersed to different parts of the town, they could corner a local market as the closest convenient shop, and also reduce the likelihood of customers taking their business elsewhere.
So why do they all locate in one central place, and thus struggle mightily to compete, perhaps reducing their profits and by the way forcing chicken customers to travel all the way downtown?
I think the main reason is that customers prefer the open-market scheme, where they can compare goods from different sellers in an open environment analogous to the nearby old-fashioned fish market. A lone market can be attractive when the goods are indistinguishable commodities -- in a U.S. supermarket, we trust most packaged chicken quality (though of course companies spend millions trying to convince us of the distinctiveness of their mostly identical products) and we trust that the pricing is competitive, so we will buy a chicken at the nearest market.

Another important aspect of this clustering is transportation, and the difficulty of moving perishable goods to the market. It is much more efficient to deliver all the chickens to one location -- less chance of spoilage and problems en-route.

We see a clustering effect at shopping malls: each mall needs some Anchor stores, the big names that will draw customers to spend time in the area, where customers trust they will be able to see an assortment of products from different sources.

In Rahima, we also enjoyed some delicious fresh Afghani bread, hot from the oven:

From 201009 Saudi scenes

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