Large cities have gained stronger vitality and highly sophisticated urban functions in these last few decades. This trend helps the center retail environment (CCRE) in large cities to attract more consumers. On the other hand, satellite cities near the large cities are loosing their potential consumers due to a lack of well-developed transportation hub systems. The CCRE in the large cities are easily accessible and provide more attractive options and interests for consumers. A combination of these conditions and opening of large shopping malls and supermarkets in urban fringe areas has fostered a decline of traditional shopping sites (Shopping Streets Federation: SSF) in the CCRE. Motivated shop-owners or members of the SSF are trying to overcome this situation through projecting a variety of entertainment programs (i.e. music festivals). These projects, however, are not always successful because of a lack of precise understanding of consumers' demands, expectations and interests. This study was conducted to understand consumers' preferences for the CCRE environment by the text-mining method. This survey employed two methods; 1) respondents filled out a form for assessment of a retail store by the cloze procedure and 2) were allowed to freely answer questions about CCRE. The former method allowed us to identify the respondents' evaluation and reasons whereas the latter method provided CCRE with consumers' requests. The results from this study encompassed the following four major findings. 1) Consumers' recall patterns of shops differ according to the respondents' occupation 2) Positive evaluation patterns differ according to the type of retail store 3) Completion of evaluations for each shop depends on the interest of the consumers 4) Occupation of consumers affects the type of requests to CCRE Finally, the results from this study indicate a potential availability of qualitative data for further research on consumers' preference for retail stores and CCRE. JEL Classification: C49, R11, R58