Data Set

The data set I used was the Top 250 Restaurant Business Rankings for 2020. This had information about the sales, number of locations, the category of food and a few other things. The only problem with this data set when it came to graphing was that there was no time type of variable which is always useful for graphing. There was also no locations that I could put on some kind of map which would have been interesting to see.

Findings

These are my findings and graphs for everything I looked into. My overall finding was that McDonald’s has such a massive monopoly over the restaurant business that it shifts the numbers for everything. This can be seen in the graphs below.

Sales by Restaurant

This graph was just to show the top 10 restaurants and their sales numbers compared to each other. As we can see, McDonald’s is much is further ahead in sales than every other major restaurant.

Restaurants and Locations

This graph is a stacked bar graph that shows the number of locations of each restaurant in the top 10. It is then stacked with how much the locations increased in the past year. The yearly increase does not make the graph look much different, but it shows which restaurants grew and which ones shrunk in number. This shows that Subway has the most locations and yet it actually got rid of more locations than it gained. Compared to rankings, McDonald’s still is the number one restaurant with locations actually shrinking and it did not even start with the most locations.

Locations and Sales

This graph is another stacked bar graph, but it shows only the top 10 categories of restaurants and compares it to both sales and locations. This graph shows us that as locations increase, so do the sales. The Quck Service & Coffee Cafe do seem to dip in sales some even though they are second in locations. We can also see again that Quick Service & Burger has such a monopoly that even with their locations slightly lowering the past year, they are so far in front of every other category in terms of sales.

Category Count

This graph shows the count of every category in the top 250 restaurants. It shows that the “varied menu” category is so much more frequent than the other categories. Surprisingly, Quck Service & Burger is only the thrid most frequent category, yet they still have the massive monopoly over all the restaurants mostly because of McDonald’s.

Sales per Category

This final graph is a donut graph that shows the amount of sales divided by the top 10 categories. It further proves the monopoly of McDonald’s with 44.2% of sales being in the Quick Service & Burger category. The second most is Quick Service & Coffee Cafe which is mostly because of Starbuck’s. Then the rest of the categories are pretty evenly split.