Choosing of supermarket location with anaytical hierarchy process

Choosing of retail store location is one of the most important elements of retail management strategies, and one of the most critical factors which affect the enterprise success. The location of a retail store has an important effect on its sales and profits, and because of this, has a vital importance for the success of the store. A good location sometimes means to compasate the managerial mistakes, on the other hand, a bad location can cause difficulties even to the best qualitified entrepreneurs. Because of this, establishment place should be chosen carefully. With help of some economical and technical factors, the size and the scope of the enterprise should be taken into consideration, and the features of the establishment places should be compared with eachother.In the scope of this thesis, the subject of choosing store location for the supermarkets has been studied, and using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is being used increasingly in the recent days, in choosing establishment location of retail store has been explained. AHP, which is one of the multi-criteria desicion making methods, is a method that determines the importance between two elements and quantity of this importance, after it divides the problem into small pieces. It provides opportunity on evaluating quantitative and qualitative factors. Moreover, it ensures to benefit from opinions of several experts and their participations in the desicion making process. Due to these features of the method, it is emphasized in this thesis that one of the scopes of using AHP method can be choosing establisment place. The recommended method has been discussed in two stages. In the first stage, the city or district has been chosen and in the second stage, a zone has been chosen in the city or district which has been chosen previosly.