Comments on: Mapping and Animating Growth of Target Across United States

By: Christa

Christa — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:26:05 +0000

Looks like Atlanta isn’t active. Is this correct, or a mistake?

By: Carrie

Carrie — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:42:15 +0000

How about K-Mart? It would be cool to see the shrink in stores. Then compare to Wal-mart & Target.

By: Andre Sammartino

Andre Sammartino — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:18:23 +0000

Great work again. I hope you keep up these efforts. Maybe a more international one next time. If you want to contact me, I may be able to organise some store data for you on one the “biggies”.

By: International BS Blog

International BS Blog — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:16:46 +0000

Scattergun Target expansion…

You may recall my discussion in January of the nifty Wal-Mart expansion graphic at Flowing Data.
Well, they’ve delivered another one. This time it’s fellow US big-box discount retailer Target under the microscope. Click on the pic below f…

By: Don

Don — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:10:31 +0000

Where do you get your data. You don’t have target in Rapid City SD until 2008. I know it was there probably since the early 80s.

By: mjb

mjb — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:17:09 +0000

This is interesting stuff. I grew up in Minneapolis and Target was a spin-off from Daytons’ (Dayton-Hudson Corp., now Marshall Field I believe. A shame.) We moved to Missouri in the mid 60′s and I remember mom putting us in the VW bus and going to Target in St. Louis. Opening no. 3? 4?

By: rbehs

rbehs — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:14:37 +0000

I noticed the same thing with Rochester, MN, as other commenters did above with other stores. There was a Target in Rochester from at least the mid 80s, but it seems to show up only when a new Target was built across the highway in the 90s. I wonder if this problem with the data is obscuring a more organic growth pattern?

By: Christopher Collins

Christopher Collins — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:59:25 +0000

I would like to see store closures included in these visualizations. I read once that Walmart is the largest owner of vacant real estate in the US due to store closures. It would be informative to compare Target and Walmart on that metric.

By: Mapping and Animating Growth of Target Across United States — Some Random Dude

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:57:05 +0000

[...] Mapping and Animating Growth of Target Across United States [...]

By: Karen

Karen — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:11:19 +0000

I love these maps! Another really fun visualization. Making the Target red circle symbols into the Target icon would be interesting as well.

Warning – stop reading here if you are not interested in a couple of critiques. If visualization is important, doing it well is important and that includes using appropriate cartographic principles on maps. You all are doing such amazing work, please push the quality on the maps a bit more. It is worthwhile to study the implementation of maps by expert cartographers as the choices that they make are very deliberate. For example compare the shape of the US on this one versus the New York Times Twitter map. The lack of an appropriate map projection causes a significant distortion of the higher latitudes in this visualization. Also why show a hillshaded topographic base and labels when their only contribution on this map is to distract? Likewise, why show Canada & Mexico when this is a map of the US?
OK, all done.

Again, I love this map! Please keep up the great work. K.