Spokane Business Trends

• Closures by YearWhat closed in a single year, which business types shrank hardest in the run up to it, and which sectors and subsectors took the worst of it.
• Co-location: Who Sits Next to WhomWhich kinds of business end up on the same block, and which keep away from each other. A ZIP+4 is a block face or a single building, so this is Hotelling's question asked of a real register — with the mail-drop addresses that would otherwise dominate it taken out, and shown to you first.
• Spokane County OverviewSpokane County's whole business register: how many are open, how that has moved, which sectors and ZIPs hold them, and what is growing and shrinking. The sector control narrows every panel.
• Business Type ReportPick a business type and see which ZIP codes have the most of it — in raw numbers and as a share of everything open in those ZIPs — plus its opening and closing trends over time.
• Legal Status ReportPick a legal form and see which business types use it, how dominant it is inside each of them, and how its share has moved over time.
• Macro I: Cycles & DynamismAggregate shocks read through firm entry and exit: the 2008–09 recession, the pandemic, and the long slide in business dynamism. Gross flows are shown beside the net change, because two economies with the same net change can be churning at completely different rates underneath.
• Macro II: Structural ChangeWhat the county's economy is made of and how that has shifted since 2005: the move between sectors, which sectors carried the net growth, and the institutional shift in how businesses choose to organise themselves. Every share is a share of firms, not of output or employment.
• Micro: Firms, Markets & SpaceFour microeconomic principles read off the entry, exit and location of real firms: free entry and long-run equilibrium, creative destruction, the market structure spectrum, and spatial competition. Narrow to one sector to see whether the pattern holds inside it.
• Relatedness: Digits vs MeaningRelated variety is normally measured by how many leading NAICS digits two industries share. This page tests that against similarity computed from the official NAICS text definitions, using whether the two actually end up on the same block as the referee. Change the ZIP+4 cutoff to see how much the answer depends on which addresses you keep.
• Opening & Closing SeasonsPick a month and see which business types are registered in it and which close in it, against the county's overall seasonal shape.
• ZIP Code ReportEverything happening in a Spokane County ZIP code: what is there now, what opened recently, which business types are growing fastest, and how the ZIP's trajectory compares with the average ZIP in the county.