The Impact of Work-from-Home on Brick-and-Mortar Retail Establishments: Evidence from Card Transactions

We build a novel dataset tracking retail establishments based on billions of card transactions to study the impact of COVID-19 induced work-from-home (WFH) on brick-and-mortar retail locations. We find that retail establishments have paralleled the exodus of populations from large, expensive cities and city centers in preference for smaller Sun Belt cities and suburbs. In contrast to office markets, the negative behavioral impact of WFH on retail establishment growth is strongest near residential locations. The effects are also negative where nearby workers transitioned to WFH and for establishments with products tied to in-office employment.