CBECS Grocery Store Establishment Data

CBECS 2012 - Release date: October 12, 2016

Introduction

The Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) is a national sample survey that collects information on the stock of U.S. commercial buildings, including their energy-related building characteristics and energy usage data (consumption and expenditures). The 2012 CBECS collected data on 6,720 buildings which represent 5.6 million commercial buildings in the United States.

The unit of analysis for the CBECS is a building, which is defined by the CBECS as a structure totally enclosed by walls extending from the foundation to the roof, containing over 1,000 square feet of floorspace and intended for human occupancy. One type of building by CBECS definition is the strip shopping center—a strip of businesses that is usually built as a unit, set back from the street, and often has parking in front. In the published detailed tables and public use microdata file, strip shopping center buildings as a whole are included in the enclosed and strip malls building activity category.

However, businesses within strip shopping centers are interviewed separately during data collection. CBECS refers to these as establishment interviews. For details about the strip shopping center subsampling procedures, see How were data collected for strip shopping centers in the 2012 CBECS?

Grocery stores are often found within strip shopping center buildings instead of standalone buildings. Because they are high-intensity energy users that are of interest to some data users, this data file of 38 food sales establishments larger than 25,000 square feet is being made available for public analysis. This size cut-off was used in order to preclude inclusion of convenience stores. While there may a number of smaller food sales buildings that could be considered grocery stores, after looking at the data, 25,000 square feet seemed to be a natural cut-off.

This information is not found in the published 2012 CBECS tables or microdata. In some respects, these 38 food sales establishment cases augment the 23 food sales building cases (larger than 25,000 square feet) already available in the CBECS data, but it is important to note that there are no sampling weights in this establishment file and therefore it is not possible to make national-level estimates using these data. EIA recommends the establishment-level grocery store data be used for exploratory research uses only.

Grocery establishments public use microdata file

This 2012 CBECS grocery establishments microdata file contains untabulated records for 38 individual food sales establishments that are larger than 25,000 square feet.

Many, but not all, of the variables present in the CBECS building-level microdata file are found on this file. Some questions were administered for the whole strip shopping center, not the individual businesses, so those variables are not found on this file (e.g., wall construction material and percent heated or cooled). There is energy consumption information on this file, but no energy expenditures or end use estimates. The Variable and Response codebook for grocery establishments contains some additional information on the consumption variables and imputation flags.

There are no sampling weights associated with establishment level data, so national-level estimates cannot be made using these records.

Data are available in two formats: a CSV (comma delimited) file and a SAS data file. The Variable and Response codebook for grocery establishments contains the variable length, type, labels, and descriptions of the response codes for each variable. The SAS format codes can be used to assign formats to variables in SAS.

File name	Format	Release date	Revised date
2012 CBECS grocery establishments microdata	SAS	October 2016	N/A
2012 CBECS grocery establishments microdata	CSV	October 2016	N/A
Variable and response codebook for grocery establishments	XLS	October 2016	N/A
SAS format codes	SAS	June 2015	May 2016