Where should the next store
in Ho Chi Minh City open?

01 / A street is more than its footfall

A head count tells us how many people pass a place. It does not tell us how many are likely to shop there. A commuter moving through the area, a resident buying dinner, and a rider collecting an order can all appear in the same traffic count. Their reasons for being there are different.

A useful field notebook would separate those movements by time and mission. For each observation window, record direction of travel, whether stopping is practical, which nearby stores people choose, and what barriers stand between seeing the storefront and making a purchase. These observations are prompts for inquiry, not a license to infer household demand from one afternoon.

The unit of analysis is therefore not simply a busy street. It is a recurring shopping task that the location can help someone complete. A strong site should make the relevant task easier often enough to support the business.

02 / Redraw the radius in minutes

A circle on a map is a convenient starting point. It becomes misleading when we treat everything inside it as equally reachable. An entrance, a difficult crossing, or a delivery bottleneck can change access without changing straight-line distance.

For the imagined sites, I would draw three maps. One follows a person walking to the store. Another follows someone arriving by motorbike and needing to stop. The third follows the path from a digital order to picking and handover. Each asks a different question about what “near” means.

This is where an expansion playbook needs care. An operating method can transfer from China while the local pattern of shopping, streets, and fulfillment does not. The transferable asset might be inventory discipline or purchasing knowledge. The site assumptions still need to be rebuilt.

03 / Put the location inside the economics

Now suppose A serves 120 orders a day at an average of VND 50,000, while B serves 80 at VND 60,000. Those are invented inputs. Both have a 30% merchandise margin. A appears ahead on revenue, but its assumed fulfillment and fixed costs are also higher.

After the specified costs, A retains VND 200,000 per day and B retains VND 460,000. The example does not establish that quieter sites are better. It establishes that ranking sites by order count alone can miss a reversal in operating contribution.

The assumptions matter more than the apparent precision of the bars. What happens if B needs a promotion to sustain those 80 orders? What if its higher basket is temporary? What if A’s capacity allows costs to grow more slowly than volume? Each change could alter the ranking. A decision requires observed inputs and sensitivity analysis.

04 / Move the logic, then test the fit

The location logic migration thesis organizes the question into three pillars: demand density, customer access, and fulfillment economics. A model travels well when the new market can reproduce the relationships that made it work, or when the operator can deliberately redesign them.

That is more demanding than copying a store format. It asks which conditions are essential, which are merely familiar, and which can be replaced. If customers use a different channel, or the supply network has a different rhythm, the same physical store may need a different operating model.

A countercase matters. A destination brand may pull shoppers past inconvenient access. An unusually favorable lease may compensate for weak traffic. The framework should expose these exceptions and the mechanisms behind them, rather than explain every outcome after the fact.

05 / What I would verify next

Before turning this exercise into a recommendation, the next field round would need a sampling plan across weekdays, weekends, and several time windows. Candidate sites would be compared on the same definitions, with original notes kept alongside the analysis.

• Demand: distinguish repeated shopping missions from pass-through traffic and record the limits of the sample.
• Access: measure actual trips, stopping friction, and the order-to-handover path.
• Economics: replace assumed rents, baskets, margins, and delivery costs with verifiable inputs.
• Counterevidence: write down what would make the favored location lose its advantage.

The valuable output is a decision someone else can inspect and challenge. That is the kind of field note I want this site to hold: close enough to the street to ask better questions, and explicit enough about its logic to be revised.