Seven Retail Chains, Mapped by State: Texas Wins on Paper, Mississippi and DC Win in Reality

"Which state has the most Dollar Generals" sounds like a five-minute query: search the brand name, facet by state, done. We tried exactly that on Crawlora's 132M+ Google Maps business dataset, and it was wrong before we'd even gotten to the interesting part. The search API doesn't do phrase matching — it OR-matches individual words — so a single-word query like "Target" pulls in gun ranges (shooting targets) and cell-phone-repair shops, and a hyphenated one like "Chick-fil-A" tokenizes into fragments loose enough to pull in a rival chicken chain. We caught all of this before publishing a single number, and the methodology for catching it is worth as much as the findings themselves.

Why "just search the brand name" doesn't work

Four separate failure modes showed up before we trusted a single chain's count:

What we tried	What went wrong	Fix
q='Dollar General'	OR-matches 'dollar' and 'general' separately — top category was general_store (62,236), not dollar_store (32,520); 85,131 total hits, majority false positives (general_practitioner, general_hospital, insurance brokers, churches)	q='General' + category=dollar_store — 'General' alone doesn't collide once category is fixed, since Dollar Tree/Family Dollar/King Dollar don't contain that word
q='Walmart' + category=grocery_store	Walmart's in-store departments (Deli, Pharmacy, Money Center, Grocery Pickup) each get their own Maps pin sharing the 'Walmart' name; a small rating-sorted sample looked ~50% noise	Re-sampled 100 records by recency (not rating) — the true contamination rate was ~7%, not ~50%. Rating-sorted samples over-represent rare, low-volume listings that hit 5 stars easily.
q='Chick-fil-A' + category=fast_food_restaurant	The hyphenated name tokenizes into fragments loose enough to match A&W Restaurant (2x), Golden Chick — an actual rival fried-chicken chain (2x) — and unrelated cafes. Only 13/20 sampled were genuine.	None found. Dropped from this piece rather than publish a ~35%-contaminated number.
q='Target' (unfiltered)	Top category was cell_phone_store (2,069), not department_store (1,657) — 'target' collides with gun shops, shooting ranges, and unrelated 'Target Mobile'-branded repair shops	category=department_store — 20/20 sampled clean once scoped

The pattern: single distinctive words work (Starbucks, Costco, Whataburger — no dictionary-word collision, clean on the first try). Common words don't (General, Target, Market). Hyphenated names are unpredictable and need their own verification every time. And a category filter alone isn't a substitute for actually sampling the result and reading the name field — the Walmart case shows the same category filter can look ~50% contaminated or ~93% clean depending purely on which sort order you happened to sample from.

The clean baseline: what a still-regional chain's geography looks like

Before the "two Americas" chains, it's worth seeing what a genuinely regional (not yet national) chain looks like, as a control. Whataburger operates in only 17 states, and its per-capita pattern is the cleanest in the whole dataset — a straightforward radial decay from its home market:

Texas2.26home market, 717 of 1,039 total (69%)

Oklahoma1.02

Arkansas0.64

Louisiana0.61

New Mexico0.56

Alabama0.52

Mississippi0.44

Arizona0.37

Tennessee0.36

Missouri0.26

That's the baseline: distance from headquarters, nothing more complicated. The six national chains below don't look like this at all — which is itself the finding.

Two Americas: Dollar General and Starbucks are near-mirror images

Sort Dollar General's 14,122 US listings by raw count and Texas wins, unsurprisingly — it's the second-biggest state by population. Normalize to population and the leader is Mississippi, at 16.82 per 100,000 residents — 3.3x Texas's own rate (5.03):

Rank	State	Listings	Per 100k residents
1	Mississippi	497	16.82
2	Arkansas	427	13.71
3	Kentucky	542	11.77
4	Louisiana	517	11.19
5	Oklahoma	461	11.18
6	Alabama	580	11.17
7	Missouri	528	8.42
8	West Virginia	143	8.10
9	Tennessee	583	7.97
10	Iowa	258	7.97

This tracks a real, previously-reported pattern — Dollar General's saturation of poor rural Southern counties has been covered by outlets like The Atlantic and Bloomberg — and this dataset independently reproduces it with fresh numbers. The bottom of the list is just as sharp: California (0.46/100k), Utah (0.20), and Idaho (0.15) — Dollar General is essentially absent from the West Coast and Mountain West.

Starbucks' per-capita map is close to the inverse. Mississippi — Dollar General's #1 state — is Starbucks' last-place state (2.20 per 100k), and the top of Starbucks' list isn't even led by California, its biggest raw market:

Washington DC10.38

72 listings

Colorado8.91

536 listings

Washington (home state)8.02

642 listings

California (most raw listings)7.23

2,846 listings

Mississippi (last place)2.20

65 listings

Two chains, same underlying dataset, near-opposite geography — one tracking rural Southern poverty, the other tracking wealthy, dense, coastal-and-mountain-urban markets. That contrast is the strongest single finding in this piece.

McDonald's: the closest thing to actually flat

If Dollar General and Starbucks show two different Americas, McDonald's shows something closer to one — its per-capita spread is far tighter than any other chain here:

Rank	State	Per 100k residents
1	Kentucky	5.10
2	Indiana	4.82
2	Arkansas	4.82
4	Louisiana	4.76
5	Michigan	4.74
6	Illinois	4.73
7	Ohio	4.59
7	Wyoming	4.59
9	Kansas	4.57
10	Mississippi	4.50

The full spread, bottom to top across every state with a presence, runs roughly 2.16 (New Jersey) to 5.10 (Kentucky) — the Northeast's dense, expensive real estate markets sit lowest, everywhere else is close to uniform. McDonald's simply is closer to the "ubiquitous" reputation it has; Dollar General and Starbucks only earn that reputation in their own regions.

Home turf still shows up in the data

Three chains carry a detectable "does the company's own headquarters state still show up" signal:

Chain	HQ state	HQ state's per-capita rank
Target	Minnesota	#1 nationally (1.08/100k) — Target's own headquarters state is its single best market
Starbucks	Washington	#3 nationally (8.02/100k), behind only DC and Colorado
Costco	Washington	#2 nationally (0.44/100k), behind only Alaska

Target's result is the cleanest of the three — Minnesota isn't just in the top tier, it's the outright #1 state, ahead of Illinois, Colorado, and California. Costco's Alaska-leads-everything result (0.81/100k, nearly double #2 Washington) is really a small-population-inflation artifact — 6 warehouses over a tiny population produces a high rate almost by construction — but Washington's own #2 spot, right behind it, is a real signal. Costco overall is also the sparsest chain in this piece by a wide margin: even its #1 state tops out at 0.81 per 100k, versus Dollar General's 16.82 — warehouse clubs need a much bigger catchment population per store than any other format here.

A different cut: how visible are these 7 chains against a state's entire business landscape?

Every ranking so far compares one chain against itself, state to state. A different question: of every business Google Maps knows about in a given state — every dentist, law firm, restaurant, and real estate agent, not just retail — what share belongs to one of these seven recognizable chains? We built that ratio for all 50 states, using the same verified per-state counts from every section above, divided by each state's total listing count.

Rank	State	Share of all listings	Biggest single contributor
1	Nevada	0.651%	Starbucks (239)
2	Arizona	0.487%	Starbucks (385)
3	New Mexico	0.406%	Dollar General (121)
4	Mississippi	0.394%	Dollar General (497)
5	Texas	0.389%	Dollar General (1,596)
…	(40 states omitted — full ranking in the table below)
41	Delaware	0.180%	—
42	Massachusetts	0.169%	—
43	New York	0.168%	—
44	New Jersey	0.164%	—
45	Connecticut	0.155%	—
46	Rhode Island	0.144%	—
47	New Hampshire	0.138%	—
48	North Dakota	0.135%	—
49	Maine	0.113%	—
50	Vermont	0.102%	—

9 of the bottom 11 states are New England or the Mid-Atlantic — Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Delaware. The only real outlier down there is North Dakota, a small rural state with no obvious reason to cluster with the Northeast. The top is a Sunbelt-and-West story instead: Nevada's lead is driven by Starbucks (239) and 7-Eleven (188) together, plausibly Las Vegas's dense tourist-commercial-corridor economy; Arizona is Starbucks-driven too (385); Mississippi is the one Deep South entry in the top 5, and it's almost entirely Dollar General (497 of its 733 total).

Show the full 50-state chain penetration ranking

Rank	State	Share of all listings
1	Nevada	0.651%
2	Arizona	0.487%
3	New Mexico	0.406%
4	Mississippi	0.394%
5	Texas	0.389%
6	California	0.388%
7	Oregon	0.375%
8	Oklahoma	0.367%
9	Virginia	0.366%
10	Hawaii	0.355%
11	Washington	0.343%
12	Kentucky	0.338%
13	Utah	0.337%
14	South Carolina	0.327%
15	Arkansas	0.326%
16	Indiana	0.313%
17	Louisiana	0.311%
18	Colorado	0.303%
19	Missouri	0.301%
20	Illinois	0.299%
21	Tennessee	0.298%
22	Alabama	0.297%
23	Michigan	0.294%
24	Ohio	0.284%
25	West Virginia	0.274%
26	North Carolina	0.271%
27	Maryland	0.270%
28	Kansas	0.269%
29	Florida	0.260%
30	Georgia	0.248%
31	Iowa	0.235%
32	Nebraska	0.224%
33	Alaska	0.220%
34	Idaho	0.198%
35	South Dakota	0.196%
36	Pennsylvania	0.195%
37	Wisconsin	0.192%
38	Montana	0.191%
39	Minnesota	0.188%
40	District of Columbia	0.185%
41	Delaware	0.180%
42	Massachusetts	0.169%
43	New York	0.168%
44	New Jersey	0.164%
45	Connecticut	0.155%
46	Rhode Island	0.144%
47	New Hampshire	0.138%
48	North Dakota	0.135%
49	Maine	0.113%
50	Vermont	0.102%

The honest limit of this metric: it doesn't isolate why. The denominator is every business type Google Maps tracks, not retail specifically. A state with proportionally more professional-services listings — law firms, doctors, real estate agents, plausibly overrepresented in wealthy Northeastern markets — would show a lower chain-penetration score even if its raw chain density per resident were identical to Nevada's. This index measures relative visibility of these 7 chains against a state's full business landscape, not "how chain-dominated is retail specifically" in that state. A retail-only denominator would be the natural refinement, and we haven't built it here.

7-Eleven's real center of gravity is the Mid-Atlantic, not the coasts

7-Eleven has more raw California listings (1,755) than anywhere else, which reads as "a California chain" until you check per capita:

Virginia8.58

Washington DC7.35

Montana7.34

Colorado6.50

Maryland6.22

Nevada5.73

West Virginia4.87

Texas4.47

California (most raw listings)4.46

Florida4.35

Virginia, DC, and Maryland — the DC metro region — hold 3 of the top 5 spots. That's a genuinely different geography from every other chain in this piece: not a Deep South story, not a wealthy-coastal story, not a home-turf story (7-Eleven's US headquarters is in Texas, which ranks a respectable but unremarkable 8th). The Midwest and Deep South are 7-Eleven's real void — Alabama, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Idaho all sit under 0.25 per 100k.

Walmart: the one we couldn't cleanly count

We tried the same method on Walmart and it broke worse than any other chain here — worth documenting precisely because it's the case where "filter by category and call it done" would have produced a confidently wrong number.

Unfiltered, q="Walmart"'s top category wasn't a store type at all — it was money_transfer_service (10,480 hits), ahead of pharmacy, photo_shop, garden_center, bakery, and deli. Walmart's in-store departments (Pharmacy, Photo Center, Garden Center, Deli, Money Center, Auto Care, Tire Center) each get their own separate Google Maps pin at the same physical address, every one of them carrying "Walmart" in the name.

Scoping to the three plausible "real store" categories and sampling each one properly (by recency, not rating — the lesson from the table above):

Category	Raw total	Est. % genuine stores	Est. clean count
department_store	2,474	~100% (100/100 sampled)	2,474
grocery_store	1,690	~93% (92/99 sampled)	~1,571
supermarket	201	~75% (rough, 20-record sample)	~151

~4,195 is our best estimate, not an exact count. We're disclosing that distinction deliberately: it would have been easy to report department_store alone (2,474) as "the" Walmart count and quietly undercount by nearly half, or to report the unfiltered grocery_store total (1,690) and overcount with pickup-point noise. Neither is in this piece as a headline number.

How we did this, and the caveats

Every number above comes from a live search/facets call against Crawlora's Google Maps business dataset, 2026-08-25/26 snapshot, cross-referenced against US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 (July 1, 2025) state population estimates. Every chain's count was verified against a live sample before being trusted — the exact sample size and cleanliness ratio is stated in each section, not glossed over.

Caveats worth stating plainly: McDonald's per-capita uses the fast_food_restaurant category subset only (12,009 of its verified 13,592 total, ~88%) — a fully precise version would sum all four verified categories per state, which we didn't do for every state. Walmart's total is a disclosed estimate, not an exhaustive enumeration. Chick-fil-A was dropped entirely rather than publish a ~35%-contaminated number — a real chain missing from this piece is a more honest outcome than a wrong number included in it. Costco's Alaska result is partly a small-population artifact — 6 warehouses over a tiny population inflates the rate; Washington's #2 spot is the more meaningful signal. And this is a live-growing dataset — a re-pull months from now will show different, likely higher, totals across every chain.

If you want to run your own brand-saturation cuts on this data, that's exactly what Crawlora's Google Maps business API is for — the same structured-data approach behind our busiest metro areas and PitchBook studies.

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