Logistics: a threat to, or a support for, local retail?

“We do not want a warehouse in our municipality; it would make our local retailers disappear.” How many times have logistics real estate project developers heard this argument? Although mistaken, this preconception does not come from nowhere: “For several decades, stores in city centers have been weakened, and many have disappeared,” observes Emmanuel Le Roch, co-rapporteur for the National Trade Council (CNC) on commercial vacancies. “But we have seen this trend accelerate since the Covid crisis in 2020. The average proportion of retail premises that have remained vacant over the long term now stands at 11.6% in France, compared with less than 10% before the pandemic.” Changes in consumer behavior, the establishment of shopping centers on the outskirts, and the growth of e-commerce are the reasons most often cited to explain this long-term downward trend. But other factors now need to be taken into account. “We can indeed see that we are consuming fewer and fewer goods: between 2000 and 2024, their share of the consumer basket fell from 46.2% to 37.4%, while the share of spending devoted to services rose from 29.1% to 34.8%,” Emmanuel Le Roch notes. “At the same time, e-commerce continues to grow, even though it accounts for only 15% of consumption, with peaks of 25% in certain sectors.”

Still, the opposition between logistics activities and local retail makes no sense: without logistics, stores could not stock their shelves. “And a store that is not supplied is just as much at risk as a store with no customers,” Emmanuel Le Roch sums up. He also points out that city-center logistics is not solely driven by e-commerce. “Online sales account for only 20% on average of flows in cities,” confirms Loïc Chavaroche, co-chair of the Urban Logistics Committee of Union TLF. “It also supports retail activity, notably through parcel pickup points. Furthermore, it is important to remember that logistics and transportation are merely tools that meet needs. They are also tools for revitalizing regions and cities.” For industry players, it is essential that elected officials understand the issues in their entirety. “For example, someone who thinks they can limit pollution or congestion in their city by banning trucks may not realize that they would have to be replaced by 40 times as many cargo bikes!” recalls Julien Darthout, Managing Director of Club Déméter.

What logistics brings to a city goes beyond simply supplying products. For Rémi Goléger, founding partner of real estate operator Corsalis, “logistics operators offer complementary services that enable retailers to develop new offerings for their customers and maintain their level of activity: home delivery, for example, to withstand competition from e-tailers; they also handle the collection of waste and packaging to comply with the AGEC law; and they can manage off-site storage space on retailers’ behalf, from which order preparation and final-customer delivery can be carried out, allowing them to reallocate the freed-up space to sales floors.” Logistics real estate—particularly Urban Logistics Spaces that are sound from a regulatory standpoint and designed to operate efficiently without creating nuisances for the city—is therefore also fundamental to supporting retailers. As Afilog states in the introduction to the latest edition of its White Paper on productive and logistics real estate in urban areas, “our contemporary metropolitan areas were long built on an illusion: that of a city that could do without its backstage operations (...). Logistics, craft, and productive activities were pushed to the outskirts, as if they were a part of urban life that had to be hidden.” Yet a city able to produce, store, and distribute locally is more resilient in the face of climate and geopolitical crises. The association therefore proposes, among other measures, making logistics and productive buildings genuine allies of neighborhood life and implementing land-use efficiency, while calling for the place of these activities to be secured and the regulatory framework to be adapted to innovation.

The main sticking point appears to remain the level of acceptance of these activities. Yet industry players are multiplying innovations, in both transportation and real estate: cleaner, more environmentally friendly powertrains; more efficient and less disruptive operations; operators trained in city-center safety; better-integrated real estate facilities... “The key therefore remains consultation among elected officials, professionals, retailers, and local residents,” says Rémi Goléger. “A momentum emerged during the Olympic Games, showing that this dialogue is possible and that industry players are ready to evolve their models around robust, long-lasting solutions.” For everyone involved, the sign that cities have taken logistics into account is the existence of a logistics liaison or freight transport liaison role. “This role is now appearing in more and more cities,” Julien Darthout observes. “And we can see that it works, that everyone benefits.”