Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
- Salt Lake City retail thrives, adding 419 stores since 2020, ranking fourth nationally.
- Provo/Orem/Lehi metro area struggles, with a 12.5% drop in retail establishments.
- Despite challenges, Provo/Orem/Lehi added 1,621 jobs, many in food and beverage.
PROVO — Two Utah cities, really not that far apart, are recovering from the pandemic very differently.
Dena Kennedy found a home for her bakery and boutique shop, Avenues on Fourth, in Salt Lake City's Avenues neighborhood.
"My idea was to create a fabulous little shop for all the people who live in the Avenues," Kennedy said.
Avenues on Fourth only opened its doors a couple of years ago, but she says business is good.
"Really good," she said. "Salt Lake is vibrant."
And that's not just Kennedy's opinion. Salt Lake City has experienced significant growth following the pandemic. According to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by custom printing company, Printastic, the Salt Lake City/Murray metro area has added 419 brick-and-mortar stores since 2020.
To help break down the numbers, I enlisted the help of Michael Stromberg, head of engineering and analytics at Lattice Publishing. He says the data shows especially good news for the Salt Lake area businesses since much of the rest of the county has been trending away from brick-and-mortar with more consumers shopping online.
The Salt Lake City/Murray metro area has seen a whopping 10.2% growth in retail businesses. It ranks fourth in terms of such growth among the country's largest metro areas. But while the figures show the Salt Lake area is doing very well, the economic picture isn't nearly as bright for the state.
"Conversely, Utah, as a whole ranked just 31st out of 50 states," Stromberg said of the study.
As a state, the total growth of retail businesses is up 2%. That's lower than the national average of 3.7%.
Skewing the curve for Utah's figures is the Provo/Orem/Lehi metro area. It ranks dead last in the study's 375 metro areas with a 12.5% drop in retail establishments.
"Provo may be facing similar challenges seen across the country," Stromberg said.
As for Dena Kennedy, opening Avenues on Fourth in challenging times hasn't proven to be much of a challenge at all.
"It just seems like it's really easy to do small business in Utah," she said.
In the Salt Lake area, the growth in retailers has translated into a cumulative 2,720 new jobs since 2020, according to the same Printastic analysis. Despite losing 307 retail establishments, the Provo/Orem /Lehi metro area added a total of 1,621 new jobs – many of those in the food and beverage business.
