The 20 Businesses Americans Visit The Most

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The 20 Businesses Americans Visit The Most

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More Americans put a Walmart in their GPS than any other destination. With sales of over $200 billion in the US, over 1 million workers, and almost 4,600 stores. Walmart dwarfs all other retailers.

According to Drivemode, which makes self-driving apps, of the businesses that people put into their GPS, 16.8% enter in Walmart. The analysis was based on 876,000 Android-based driving apps.

McDonald’s ranked second to Walmart with a 5.7% share. McDonald’s has many more stores that Walmart, with an American store count of 14,000. Next, discount membership retailer Costco with a 5.2 % share. Costco has only 527 locations in the U.S. It is one of the few retailers that makes shoppers buy a membership, which costs $60 a year.

The Home Depot ranks in fourth place. America’s largest home improvement retailers have a 5.1% share of retail addresses put into GPS’s. Target, Walmart’s most direct competitor, ranks fifth at 4.4%. Coffee store giant Starbucks ranks sixth with a 3.6% share. Starbucks is in direct competition with McDonald’s, particularly for the breakfast segment of fast-food consumers.

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Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics store, ranks seventh at 2.84%. It not only has to compete with the consumer electrics rivals like Walmart and Costco, Amazon has a substantial consumer electronics business, and its own products like Fire TV and Alexa powered devices that are not available in stores.

Lowe’s, The Home Depot’s primary competitor ranks eighth with a 2.83% share. Pharmacy retailer Walgreen ranks ninth with a 2.4% share. And, the US Post Office ranks 10th at 2.38%.

Drivemode also broke out retailers by type. Across the country, the most popular destination types were grocery stores (30.13%), fast food restaurants (21.29%), and consumer shopping (17.40%).

Commenting on the results, Yo Koga, Drivemode CEO, said, “If they’re not driving to work, this new study shows that Americans get behind the wheel to spend money somewhere, mostly on food. They’re especially drawn to large businesses like Walmart and McDonald’s that advertise extensively and are available, accessible, and convenient in most American communities.” He added that purchasing habits are another major factor.

Finally, the concentration of destinations in the study is significant. Nearly half of those surveyed went to one or more of nine destinations — Walmart, McDonald’s, Costco, The Home Depot, Target, Starbucks, Best Buy, Lowe’s, and Walgreens.

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Rank Popular destinations % of all requests Category % of all category requests
1 Walmart 16.75% Grocery 43.38%
2 McDonald’s 5.69% Fast Food 27.22%
3 Costco 5.20% Grocery 14.86%
4 The Home Depot 5.08% Shopping 22.51%
5 Target 4.44% Grocery 9.84%
6 Starbucks 3.57% Fast Food 12.51%
7 Best Buy 2.84% Shopping 12.28%
8 Lowe’s 2.83% Shopping 11.54%
9 Walgreens 2.44% Shopping 9.23%
10 US Post Office 2.38% N/A N/A
11 Shell 1.99% Gas 18.21%
12 CVS 1.84% Shopping 6.72%
13 Sam’s Club 1.84% Shopping 6.98%
14 Taco Bell 1.67% Fast Food 4.91%
15 In-N-Out Burger 1.52% Fast Food 4.89%
16 Chick-fil-A 1.51% Fast Food 4.99%
17 Wells Fargo Bank 1.48% Banking 30.86%
18 Wendy’s 1.47% Fast Food 4.76%
19 Burger King 1.43% Fast Food 5.81%
20 BP 1.43% Gas 13.08%
Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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