Abstract
People in depopulating regions need longer distance to stores with evacuation of retail stores. The aim of our research is to investigate distances from residents to the nearest grocery store. We measured the distances by the 500-meter square mesh data of population and grocery stores. The target region is Yamagata prefecture whose population and grocery stores are decreasing since 1980. The average distance for the nearest grocery store becomes long recently. There are about ten thousand people whose distance to the nearest grocery stores is over 2 km in Yamagata prefecture. We found that 121 new stores are required to improve all their distances less than 2 km.
