How we calculate

Everything Kalmark shows is an estimate: the sketch, the price, how good the spot is and the break-even. Below are the rules and assumptions behind the figures. None of them is a guarantee. A designer checks the plan before you get a binding offer.

The floor plan sketch

The area becomes a rectangle with the ratio you choose. The sales area is 70–75% of the gross area; the rest is storage, office and staff rooms.
The checkouts stand by the entrance, and customers walk round the store counter-clockwise from the door. What stands where along that round follows the store's trips (the next section). Where top-ups lead: produce right inside the door, then bakery; chilled and frozen towards the end of the round; the last cooler before the checkouts is one drinks cooler, and the other drinks stand at the back, by the space for the bottle-return machine and the storeroom door. Where quick visits lead: bread, a grab-and-go cooler and fruit inside the door, every drinks cooler on the back wall, so customers walk past every shelf, and low shelves across the store. From 30% full shops: more produce, the chilled cabinets on the back wall and high shelves in long aisles. Shelf rows fill the middle. Aisles are at least 1.2 m wide.
The equipment is Modern Expo's, with real dimensions: FS shelving, Cooles chillers and freezers, and Evo Seline checkouts.
The sketch is indicative. It is not checked against building codes, escape routes or fire rules. Professionals must do that for your premises.

How customers shop

We sort a store's visits into three trips: the quick visit (one to three things), the top-up (food for today and tomorrow) and the full shop (the whole store, every aisle). The store page shows the share of each and which one leads, and the plan is drawn for that mix.
First the kind of place, from the people and the grocery stores around the spot: a shopping street (at least 9 grocery stores within a 10-minute walk and under 800 residents per store, the new one counted), a dense city quarter (as many stores, more residents), a local centre (at least 4 stores and 3,000 people within a 10-minute walk), a place with few stores (under 5 within a 10-minute drive), a car location (at least 20,000 people within a 10-minute drive, but fewer than 2% of them and fewer than 1,500 within a 10-minute walk) or a neighbourhood (everything else).
Then what really stands at such places. We looked at 12,621 chain stores in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland and counted the formats at each kind of place: kiosks, convenience stores, discount stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets. Kiosks are more than four times as common on shopping streets as on average, and so are hypermarkets at car locations; where few stores are near, nearly half the stores are convenience stores. Where the cars are counted, a street with under 1,500 cars a day leans to quick visits and a road with 5,000 or more to full shops (not in the city, where people pass on foot).
Then the store itself: a larger store gets fewer quick visits and more full shops; a store like a discount store or a supermarket more planned shopping, one like a convenience store more quick visits; without fruit, vegetables and bread there are fewer top-ups and full shops.
Where each format stands is counted. How its visits split into the three trips is our judgment (a kiosk lives on quick visits, a hypermarket on full shops), and so is the effect of the store's size and type: nobody publishes trips per store. So read the shares as a pointer, not a count. The place counts residents and cars only: not offices, stations, tourists or holiday homes, and a road where the cars are not counted says nothing.
The three lines on the plan follow the loops in Modern Expo's book on convenience stores: in on the right of the door, round the store, past a checkout and out on the left. The metres are measured on the plan. The minutes add a walking pace (a quick visit 1.2 m a second, a full shop with a trolley 0.8), the time at each stop and the time at the checkout; a quick visit to a small store takes about 90 seconds, as in the book. The customers on the plan move faster than real ones.

The price

The equipment price is based on Modern Expo's list prices in euro, converted to kroner at the Norges Bank rate (NOK 10.7895 per euro; a store in Sweden, Denmark or Iceland in its own currency, at SEK 11.265, DKK 7.4756 and ISK 137.97 per euro; in Finland the euro prices as they are).
We add 18% for freight and installation, and show a range of ±15%, rounded to the nearest NOK 10,000 (in Sweden and Denmark 10,000 kronor, in Iceland 100,000 krónur, in Finland a thousand euros). Prices exclude VAT.
Not in the price: the electrician and the electrical hookup of the fridges and freezers, building works and ventilation, point of sale, IT and software, signage and lighting, the bottle-return machine (we keep the space for it), the first stock of goods and the deposit for the premises.
Under the price, the same range is split by kind of equipment: each kind is its own price, plus or minus about 15%, rounded to the nearest NOK 1,000 (the low end down, the high end up), so that the lines add up to the range. A kind of a single model, such as one ice-cream chest, shows that model's price within its own range. What matters most for the store's trips comes first, in our judgement from Modern Expo's convenience-store book: the drinks coolers, the grab-and-go cooler and the bread where quick visits lead, the chilled cabinets and the fresh food where top-ups lead, the shelf rows where full shops are 30% of the visits or more. Up to three are marked, each only where the plan bears out why.
You get the fixed price in the offer once a designer has checked the plan.
The price includes all the fridges and freezers: the chilled cabinets, the freezer cabinets, the drinks coolers and the ice-cream chest. Breweries and ice-cream suppliers often place drinks coolers or an ice-cream chest for free; the designer takes that into account in the offer.
We don't offer leasing. In the break-even the equipment counts as the middle of the price range spread evenly over 60 months (5 years), without interest.

What the store must sell to break even

Fixed costs per month are staff, rent, running costs and the equipment (spread over 5 years, above). Staff is the number of full-time staff, you included, times NOK 620,000 a year each, including employer's tax and pension. Rent is kroner per m² a year, the way landlords quote it, times the gross area.
Required sales = fixed costs ÷ gross margin. We count on a gross margin of 25%, whatever the type of store.
Staff is about three quarters of the fixed costs, so staff and rent are the two numbers that matter most. You can change them on "What does it cost?".
Every default is an estimate. Go through them with your accountant or your chain.
We don't compare that figure with a sales estimate for the place: we show how good the spot is instead (below).
Stores with at most 100 m² of sales floor can normally open on Sundays. "Smallest" is the largest store that stays under the limit (133 m² gross). Stores under the limit open every day and are costed with 2.5 full-time staff, you included, and 30 opening days a month.

Location

For every area of about 0.1 km², a model estimates the sales of a new, independent 250 m² store. The people within walking and driving distance (along the road network) are shared between the nearby stores by travel time and size. This is called a Huff model.
These areas are the map's hexagons, about 350 m across. Every figure (the people within reach, the stores, the traffic, the rank) is worked out once per hexagon, so nothing we show changes inside one. A place you choose is therefore its whole hexagon, never a point or an exact address: the map outlines it and marks no point in it. A searched address names the hexagon it lies in.
The map does not rank by sales but by what the same new 250 m² store has left each month after local costs: the gross margin (25% of sales) minus rent, staff, running costs and equipment. Staff, running costs and equipment are the same everywhere (the defaults under "What the store must sell"). Rent varies: central city areas have more customers, but also much higher rent.
The rent is an estimate for a grocery store, not a landlord's price. We work it out from how many people live within a 5-minute drive: about NOK 1,500 per m² a year where 10,000 people live that close, growing with the square root of that number. That gives about NOK 800 in villages and around NOK 6,000 in inner Oslo. It is never more than 7% of sales, because a store that cannot pay the rent does not sign. The levels rest on brokers' figures for shop units in the big cities, where grocery sits at the low end of the range. The card on the map shows the rent level as a word; on "What does it cost?" the place's estimate is the starting rent, and you can replace it with your own figure.
The map shows five bands. Each band covers about a fifth of the population: band 1 is the weakest fifth, band 5 the strongest. The bands compare places with each other: at the default figures a new store loses money in many places, average bands included, so work out your own place under "What does it cost?".
The map has two views, switched in its legend. Country is the five bands above. Local colours each place by how it ranks among the places within 7 km, the same rank the card on the map and the store page show: the top 10% darkest, then the top 20%, the top 30%, the top half, and the bottom half lightest. A place is never shown more than one step darker in Local than in Country, so a weak area stays light even where it beats its few neighbours; where fewer than 20 places within 7 km have people living in them, it is lightest.
We tested the model against the accounts of 1,438 stores that are the only store in their company. The typical (median) error is 31%. A simple rule of thumb, "every store sells like its chain's median", does about as well (32%).
The model knows nothing about tourists, commuters, holiday homes, parking or how well the store is run. Use the band as a pointer, and check the place yourself.

Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland

For Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland we use the Norwegian model as it is: how far people travel to a store, how much a bigger store pulls, and each chain's pull, taken from its Norwegian counterpart. In Sweden Willys and Lidl pull like Kiwi and Rema, X:-tra like Coop Extra, ICA Nära and Tempo like Joker; in Denmark Netto and Lidl like Kiwi, 365discount like Coop Extra, SuperBrugsen like Coop Mega, Min Købmand like Joker; in Finland Lidl like Kiwi, S-market like Coop Mega, K-Market like Joker; in Iceland Bónus like Kiwi, Krónan like Rema and Nettó like Coop Extra; the hypermarkets (City Gross, Bilka, Kvickly, Prisma, K-Citymarket, Hagkaup, Costco) like Obs. We have no store accounts in these countries to test it against, so their maps are not checked the way the Norwegian one is. They assume shoppers there behave like Norwegian ones.
The trade publishes how the grocery groups share each country's sales, and with borrowed pull the shares come out wrong: the S Group would sell too little in Finland, Coop too little in Denmark, and Lidl twice as much as in reality in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. So in each of the four countries every group's pull is turned up or down, one figure per group, until the groups split their sales as published; in Finland one figure per chain, since its figures give each chain's share, so Prisma's hypermarkets and the small Sale stores are set apart. Sweden: DLF and Delfi's Dagligvarukartan 2025 (the sales of 2024); Denmark: Retail Institute Scandinavia's shares for 2024, in the same Dagligvarukartan; Finland: the Finnish Grocery Trade Association's (PTY) shares for 2025; Iceland: the shares for 2024 in the merger notice of Samkaup and Heimkaup (2025). This sets each group's (in Finland each chain's) weight in the country, not any one store's sales. A group with too few of its stores in our list keeps its borrowed pull (in Finland, M-market), and so do the chains the figures do not name (in Sweden, Handlar'n and Matöppet). Independent stores and kiosks keep the pull the model gives them, which in Sweden and Finland is more than the trade's figures leave for the stores outside the groups.
What a household spends on groceries is scaled to each country's own grocery market per inhabitant, so figures come out in the country's currency: SEK, DKK, euro or ISK (a year per inhabitant, excluding VAT: Sweden SEK 28,800, Denmark DKK 23,000, Finland 3,600 euros, Iceland ISK 813,600). Rent, wages and running costs are local estimates, and so is VAT on food: 6% in Sweden from April 2026 to the end of 2027, 25% in Denmark, 13.5% in Finland and 11% in Iceland. Iceland's grocery market holds what its two million visitors a year buy; the model gives that spend to the residents, so a tourist place with few residents looks weaker than it is.
People: each country's official 1 km grid (Statistics Sweden's and Statistics Finland's for 2025; for Denmark the 2021 census grid, scaled to today's population), spread inside each square kilometre the way WorldPop's 100 m map (based on buildings) places people. Iceland has no open grid: Statistics Iceland's count for each of its 61 municipalities is spread over the municipality the same way. Stores: the chains' own store lists (collected by All the Places) and every other grocery shop in OpenStreetMap, without petrol stations and kiosks. The chains whose own lists are not collected come from OpenStreetMap: in Finland the S Group's (Prisma, S-market, Sale, Alepa), in Denmark Min Købmand, Løvbjerg and ABC Lavpris, in Iceland every chain but Costco.
The one check we can make there: where the grocery stores stand in the rank of their own 7 km, as for Norway below. Sweden: the median store is in the top 10%, 50% are in the top 10% and 93% in the top half. Denmark: the median store is in the top 11%, 48% are in the top 10% and 90% in the top half. Finland: the median store is in the top 9%, 51% are in the top 10% and 95% in the top half. Iceland: the median store is in the top 20%, 30% are in the top 10% and 83% in the top half.
Cars per day: the road authorities' annual average daily traffic on the state roads: Trafikverket's in Sweden (NVDB: E roads, riksvägar and länsvägar), Vejdirektoratet's in Denmark and Väylävirasto's in Finland (with the street names from OpenStreetMap), Vegagerðin's in Iceland (the national roads). In Denmark the municipalities' own counts are there too (from 2016 on; Copenhagen keeps its counts elsewhere): each holds for its street up to 250 m either side of the point where it was counted. Other municipal streets carry none, so many spots in a town centre show no traffic figure. The same roads are left out as in Norway: E roads, motorways and motorroads, tunnels, ramps and roads on separate carriageways.
Each country's model counts only its own residents. Border trade is missing: the Norwegians who shop in Swedish border towns such as Strömstad and Charlottenberg are not in the Swedish model, so those towns look weaker on the map than they are. The model counts the Danes who shop in the German border shops as customers in Denmark, so towns such as Tønder and Padborg look stronger than they are.
Norway's rule that only stores with at most 100 m² of sales floor may open on Sundays does not apply in Sweden, Denmark, Finland or Iceland. Other rules for Sunday opening apply there, and we count on the store opening every day.

How good the spot is

The store page and the card on the map show how a spot ranks among the places within 7 km where people live (areas of about 0.1 km²), by the map's measure: what a new 250 m² store would have left each month after local rent and costs.
The rank comes in steps: the top 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50%, or the bottom half. Where fewer than 20 places within 7 km have people living in them, we don't rank the spot.
We show a rank, not a sales figure. The model is not precise enough to say what one store will sell (see "Location" above).
We checked the rank against 3,727 grocery stores in Norway. The chains and grocers chose those spots, not our model. The typical store stands in the top 13% of its 7 km; 43% stand in the top 10% and 91% in the top half. A highly ranked spot is the kind of spot where stores do well.
What the rank can't do is tell two good spots apart. Of 712 pairs of stores of the same chain and a similar size within 7 km of each other, the one on the higher-ranked spot sold more in 49% of the pairs, about as often as a coin toss. That is why the rank comes in steps. Check the spot yourself: parking, visibility, the walking routes and who else is there.
The last question, which store yours is most like, doesn't change the rank. It tells the designer what kind of store you have in mind.

About the place

People living within a 10-minute walk and a 5- and 10-minute drive: Statistics Norway's population on a 250 m grid, with travel time along the road network (OpenStreetMap). Walking 5 km/h, cars at the speed limit, no congestion.
Grocery stores within 10 minutes on foot and by car: units with industry code 47.110 in the Brønnøysund Register Centre, Narvesen and 7-Eleven left out. The nearest store is the one with the shortest walk.
Cars per day: the Norwegian Public Roads Administration's annual average daily traffic on the nearest counted road within 100 m of the cell centre. E roads, tunnels, motorways and ramps don't count, because a store gets few customers from them. The larger road is the busiest counted road within 250 m. Under 50 cars a day shows as "fewer than 50".

The first year

New stores sell less than established ones. Of the 54 independent stores in our data that opened in 2023 or later, half sold less than 0.66 times the model's figure in their first full year. Expect customers to take time to find you, and have money to run at a loss at the start.

When you ask for a confirmed offer

Everything you see before that is indicative: the sketch, the price, the spot's rank and the break-even figures.
A designer checks the drawing, equipment and price against your premises and calls you within 3–5 working days of your request. Weekends and public holidays don't count.
Once the designer has confirmed the price, it is fixed for us for 30 days. You decide whether you want it; the request is free and without obligation.
We send no automatic email. The designer calls you, and the email address is optional.

Data sources and licences

Background map: drawn by us from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, licence ODbL) in the Protomaps basemap schema (protomaps.com), with Natural Earth (public domain) at the smallest scales; its labels in Noto Sans (SIL Open Font License).
Address search and place names: our own, from OpenStreetMap's addresses, streets, places, shopping centres and stations (© OpenStreetMap contributors, licence ODbL).
Stores and accounts: © Brønnøysundregistrene, licence NLOD; their addresses placed on the map with Kartverket's address register, licence CC BY 4.0.
Sweden: population © Statistics Sweden (SCB), licence CC0, spread with WorldPop (www.worldpop.org, University of Southampton), licence CC BY 4.0; chain stores from the chains' own store lists via All the Places, licence CC0; traffic counts © Trafikverket (NVDB), licence CC0; road network and other shops © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); the groups' market shares: DLF and Delfi's Dagligvarukartan 2025.
Denmark: population from Eurostat's Census 2021 grid (source: Statistics Denmark), spread with WorldPop, licence CC BY 4.0; chain stores from the chains' own store lists via All the Places, licence CC0; traffic counts © Vejdirektoratet (the state roads, and the municipalities' counts in Mastra), licence CC BY 4.0; road network, street names and other shops © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); the groups' market shares: Retail Institute Scandinavia, in DLF and Delfi's Dagligvarukartan 2025.
Finland: population © Statistics Finland (Tilastokeskus), licence CC BY 4.0, spread with WorldPop, licence CC BY 4.0; chain stores from the chains' own store lists via All the Places, licence CC0; traffic counts © Väylävirasto, licence CC BY 4.0; road network, street names and other shops © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); the chains' market shares: Päivittäistavarakauppa ry (PTY), Päivittäistavarakaupan tilastot 2025.
Iceland: population per municipality from Statistics Iceland (Hagstofa Íslands), spread over the municipality with WorldPop, licence CC BY 4.0; municipal boundaries © Landmælingar Íslands (IS 50V), licence CC BY 4.0; traffic counts © Vegagerðin, the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration, licence CC BY 4.0 (average daily traffic 2025); road network and shops © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); Costco from its own store list via All the Places, licence CC0; the groups' market shares: the merger notice of Samkaup and Heimkaup to Samkeppniseftirlitið (2025).
Country shapes on the first screen: Natural Earth (public domain).
Equipment, dimensions and list prices: Modern Expo.