Erika Ronquillo

Introduction

Unbeknownst to many of today’s society, the cellular phones we use on a daily basis collects an abundance of data based on our actions. One particular type of data that is collected is our anonymized location at the time that we hit “OK” in apps. This data is then tied to the stores or businesses that we visit and is used to get an understanding of the demand of certain brands and industries.

Data

The data that we will be analyzing for this project is taken from SafeGraph, which is a company that works with cell phone location data. The time frame we will be looking at is for the entire month of July 2020 when many public facing businesses were still closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This data will help us see how certain brands located in King County were affected during unprecedented times.

" The grocery store is the great equalizer where mankind comes to grips with the facts of life like toilet tissue." - Joseph Goldberg

Visits by Location

Key Points

  • The locations further away from the downtown area, such as Delridge and Northgate, had fewer visits compared to areas closer to downtown.
  • The location with the largest visits is just south of downtown in the East neighborhood, where many business establishments are located and very little residential homes exist. Costco is also located here, which was one of the most popular places to shop at the time since many stores were still closed.
  • Other locations that had a fairly high number of visits were the University District, Fremont/Wallingford, and Rainier Valley, where a good mixture of residential and commercial establishments are located.

Daily Visits

Key Points

  • The number of visits would drop during the weekends, with Sundays having the lowest number of visits on most weeks. This seems to show that most people did not like to leave the house very much on the weekends.
  • Fridays seemed to have the highest number of visits among the weekdays before it would drop again at the start of the weekend, which seems to indicate that many people like to complete their errands before staying home all weekend.
  • The number of visits slowly increased from the beginning of the month towards the end of the month. A possible explanation could be due to a mixture of the slow reopening of establishments along with people’s continued hesitancy to leave their homes.

Visits by Industry

Key Points

  • The two industries with the highest percentage of visits were Retail and Food & Hospitality.
  • Finance and Wholesale had the lowest percentage of visits.
  • Oddly, the Entertainment industry had the third highest percentage of visits. This is a little surprising since most large establishments were still closed at the time, including public parks.

Range of visits by Industry

Key Points

  • The industries with the largest number of visits, such as Retail and Food & Hospitality, also had the widest range for lowest to the highest number of visits.
  • The industries with the lowest number of visits, such as Agriculture and Utilities, were pretty consistent with around the same number of visits throughout the month.
  • The industry with the widest range was Food & Hospitality, with a difference 14,091 visits between the lowest and highest visit counts.

Daily Visits by Top Brands

Key Points

  • Starbucks had the highest number of average visits, which shows a pandemic cannot stop people from having their coffee. The drop in visits on weekends seem to show that most of the coffee needs took place during work days.
  • Home Depot, on the other hand, had the opposite pattern where the number of average visits increased during the weekends, which shows how many people chose to spend their non-working days.
  • Almost all of the top brands look like they were trending upward as they approached the end of the month, which could indicate that people were slowly becoming more comfortable leaving their homes to perform regular tasks. The lowest three of the top brands (Home Depot, 76 Gas, Target) seemed to stay pretty consistent, however, throughout the month.
  • One interesting point to note is the large drop in visits on July 4th for Costco. This is because Costco is famously closed on major holidays, while many other stores remain open.

Conclusion

The visit data shows the slow return to “normal” as more establishments began to open and people began to feel more comfortable leaving their homes during the pandemic. The essential businesses, such as Costco and Safeway continued to drive the biggest foot traffic during this time. It would be interesting to see how traffic had changed for a wider time frame, such as from the beginning of the year to the present.