A common use for the Consumer Expenditure Data involves finding the amount spent on a product for a given area. This tech tip explains how to create a temporary radius buffer and get household expenditure data for the encircled area.
The following steps outline how to get household expenditure data in a radius:
- Open a map that contains the Consumer Expenditure layer and zoom or pan to the area of interest.
- Choose Tools>Analysis>Buffers Toolbar.
- Click
, then click on the map at the center of the location that you want to study. - Click
, then click No when prompted to save the point to a layer. - Enter one or more radii in the Sizes box (For example, enter 3, 5, 7 to create buffers of 3, 5, and 7 miles)
- Check the Calculate Demographics and Cumulative Buffers boxes, and click
. - Choose Consumer Expenditure from the With Layer drop-down and click OK.
- Click OK to create the buffers.
Maptitude creates buffers around the location of choice and calculates the annual average household expenditure for a variety of items. A Dataview containing purchasing data for the area will be displayed. This Dataview can be searched for a specific expense using the following steps:
- With the Dataview as the active window, click
. - Click on the Field drop-down and type a portion of the name of the field that you would like to examine (for example, type Property to filter the fields and find the [Avg Property Taxes] field), and click OK.
The dataview will zoom to the field you selected and you can view the average household expenditure in your desired category for the different buffers you created.