Four ladies, saddled with shopping bags and wearing well-coordinated outfits with colorful jewelry, chatted over an al fresco lunch at The Patio in downtown Waynesville last Friday.

“How much have you spent today ladies?” Marlin Zane asked her girlfriends. The answers ranged from $70 to $30 as Zane went around the table pointing to each one.

“Plus we bought lunch, which is another $40,” Zane said. “And the day isn’t even half over.”

They were every merchant’s dream, a group of recreational shoppers with just one mission for the day.

“If I’m looking for something specific, I go where I know I’m going to find it, like Wal Mart. But if I’m out like today, I’m going to go shopping and something is going to hit me and I’m going to get it,” Zane said.

“We could spend $100 or $300,” said Diane Freund. “I think a lot of people like to do just specialty stores. I get so sick of Wal Mart and Dillard's and places like that. We like something different.”

These ladies had obviously found Waynesville, but how? Merchants want to know — were they Memorial Day weekend tourists, second-home owners, locals out for a day on the town? And where can they find more shoppers like Zane and her friends?

Business owners collect anecdotal information from customers all the time, said Ron Huelster, the director of the Downtown Waynesville Association. But merchants lack tangible demographic statistics on shoppers.

“We feel like we have no baseline marketing data to recruit new businesses and industry,” said Huelster. “That’s one thing I keep coming back to since I’ve lived in this county. We have no data to govern what we do.”

Businesses like Lowe’s and Wal Mart have long been collecting zip codes of shoppers at the check out counter. This type of market analysis has previously been out of reach for local merchants, Huelster said.

So Huelster has pitched an idea that would unite merchants in conducting a zip code poll of all their customers for two weeks — one during a dead week in winter and one during a busy week in summer or fall.

The collective data would be analyzed by a consulting firm to determine what are Waynesville’s core markets.

When the Haywood County Economic Development Commission heard about Huelster’s idea, they liked it so much they decided to expand the study to include the entire county, including Canton and Maggie Valley.

“I like the concept, to know who is coming here,” said Gavin Brown, co-chair of the EDC. “You can see where your niches are and who your customers are, and you can market to them.”

The study will cost about $20,000 and will be conducted by Arnett Muldrow and Associates of Greenville, S.C. The firm has performed collective zip code surveys of shoppers in numerous towns in the Southeast, with a special focus on Main Street towns.

Aaron Arnett, an economist with Arnett Muldrow, said businesses usually are more than willing to participate.

“Helping us out will help them individually,” said Arnett. “They normally haven’t been able to do any comprehensive marketing analysis of their own, so they are normally interested in getting the data as well for their own marketing.”

Clasby said he anticipates a good deal of buy-in from merchants.

“It’s a fairly simple form. I don’t think it’s intrusive,” Clasby said.

Each business owner will get a profile of their market from the week, research they might not be able to afford to accomplish on their own or afford to hire. The separate business profiles will be confidential, made available only to that business owner. One jewelry store wouldn’t want another jewelry store to know how well they were doing. But a business owner will be able to compare their performance to the overall market performance that week.

“It helps you from a market standpoint where to direct your advertising toward,” Clasby said. “A lot of our business comes from Sylva and surrounding counties, particularly west of here. From my past experience (as a Main Street business owner), I know we pull business from down there. This will be a way to substantiate that.”

It will also be a way to substantiate the impact of second-home owners, which Clasby said are a huge driving force in the local economy.

If Zane and her three friends are any indication of Main Street’s typical shopper, Clasby is right. The four ladies all have homes at Nantahala Lake in Macon County — two of them live there full-time and two are second-home owners.

“Once a month, we all get together and go somewhere and shop,” said Elaine Smeltzer.

Many of today’s second-home owners do not split their time evenly between here and Florida. While Kay Bradley spends about six months at her Nantahala Lake home, she travels back and forth to Florida every few weeks — spending three weeks here, three weeks there, three weeks here.

“I never thought we would spend this much time up here,” Bradley said.

Waynesville is one of their favorite destinations.

Shoppers like Bradley will complicate the zip code study — does she give her Nantahala Lake zip code or her Florida one? Arnett said the form merchants fill out will be adjusted to accommodate two zip codes. Merchants will just have to ask every shopper whether they are a second-home owner, and if so, get both zip codes, Arnett said.

All kinds of trends can be discerned from the zip code data once it’s collected. The analysts can look at the shopper demographics by sector, pulling out just the art galleries or just the restaurants. It can also be divided by region — the whole county, individual towns, districts of town or even streets. For example, Main Street could be compared to Frog Level and Hazelwood.

“Once we get all the data in our spread sheets we can slice it and dice it anyway we want to,” said Arnett.

He can use a set of economic factors to determine what services or products people are going outside the county to buy, which Arnett calls the “leakage rate.”

“Wherever the supply is not meeting the demand there’s opportunities to enhance that retail sector,” Arnett said.

The Downtown Waynesville Association, the town of Waynesville, the Economic Development Commission and possibly Advantage West will fund the study.

“The retail sector is important and we have to realize how it fits into our community economic pattern,” Brown said.