Insights · Novi Sad
Where Novi Sad is missing a drugstore
We measured the walk along real streets from every home in Novi Sad to the nearest DM or Lilly, the city's two big drugstore chains. Almost half of the residents are more than ten minutes away, and the stores that do exist sit mostly in the same few streets.
Half the city lives more than ten minutes away
Every home in the map below is coloured by its walking time to the nearest of the 28 stores (12 DM and 16 Lilly). Green areas have a store within ten minutes on foot; red areas don't.
The gap is not only on the edge of town. Inside Novi Sad itself, about a third of residents are more than ten minutes from a store, mostly in the house areas of Telep, Klisa and Slana Bara, Jugovićevo and the western part of Bistrica. Across the Danube, Petrovaradin and Sremska Kamenica have no DM or Lilly at all, and neither does Veternik in the west.
Two chains, the same streets
The stores aren't missing. They are concentrated in the centre, often within a few hundred metres of each other. Eight of the twelve DM stores have a Lilly within 300 m.
That overlap shows in the numbers. Counting DM alone, 55% of residents have no store within ten minutes. Adding all 16 Lilly stores brings that down only to 46%, because most of them serve the same people.
Where a new store would reach the most people
Residents more than a 10-minute walk from the nearest DM or Lilly, by area:
| Area | Residents too far |
|---|---|
| Veternik0 stores | 18,800 |
| Klisa · Slana Bara · Vidovdansko naselje | ~17,900 |
| Telep | ~16,300 |
| Petrovaradin0 stores | 15,600 |
| Futog2 stores | 14,700 |
| Sremska Kamenica0 stores | 12,600 |
Estimates. Residents are spread across buildings by size (see the method below), so neighbourhood figures are approximate.
What this means for retailers
The pattern is common far beyond Novi Sad: chains open where footfall is proven, close to the centre and close to each other, while large residential areas wait. For a growing chain, the useful question is not only "how busy is this street?" but also "how many people live closer to this site than to any store we, or our competitors, already have?".
A busy spot with a competitor next door and a quieter spot that serves 15,000 people with nothing nearby are different bets. Seeing both before signing a lease is the point of a location analysis.
How we measured it
- Stores: the two largest drugstore chains, DM (12 stores, from the DM store finder) and Lilly (16, from the Lilly store map), October 2026. Smaller drugstores and pharmacies are not included.
- Walking: shortest paths along streets and footpaths from OpenStreetMap, at 4.8 km/h, from every residential building to the nearest store.
- Residents: 2022 census totals for Novi Sad, Petrovaradin, Sremska Kamenica, Veternik and Futog (325,551), spread across residential buildings by floor area.
- Checks: two different ways of classifying residential buildings change the headline result by less than one percentage point.
Missing footpaths in the map data can make some walks look slightly longer than they are. All figures are estimates.
See it for your own location
Our free location check scores any address in the world for your type of business, drugstores included. For a full picture of a city or a network, like the one above, talk to us.