Tony Wang8 min readIndependents Out-Rate Chains in 15 of 16 Industries. The Exception Is Self-Storage.
We measured every rated US listing in 16 categories, 569,422 in all. The independent premium is real, ranges from 0.06 to 0.71 stars, and we can't explain it.
The ranking
A "chain" here is a business whose website domain appears on five or more listings in that category; an "independent" is a domain appearing exactly once. Both groups exclude unrated listings.
| Category | Independent advantage (stars) | Independent listings | Chain listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| pharmacy | +0.71 | 10,574 | 42,195 |
| coffee_shop | +0.59 | 17,118 | 38,008 |
| motel | +0.52 | 3,332 | 670 |
| bakery | +0.47 | 18,110 | 14,940 |
| hotel | +0.40 | 8,481 | 14,638 |
| dentist | +0.33 | 48,179 | 15,293 |
| veterinary_care | +0.33 | 924 | 65 |
| gym | +0.31 | 18,850 | 15,484 |
| tire_shop | +0.21 | 7,346 | 14,360 |
| hair_salon | +0.21 | 54,369 | 23,797 |
| spa | +0.13 | 11,169 | 2,565 |
| optometrist | +0.11 | 8,363 | 13,728 |
| nail_salon | +0.09 | 32,449 | 12,123 |
| auto_repair_shop | +0.06 | 55,409 | 12,690 |
| car_dealer | +0.06 | 15,193 | 800 |
| self_storage_facility | −0.16 | 12,871 | 25,329 |
The two things that make this more than a slogan
"Local business beats corporate" is a claim most people already hold, so the interesting content is not the direction — it is the size, and the exceptions.
Auto repair and car dealers show essentially nothing (+0.06 each). This matters more than any of the large gaps, because it kills the most obvious alternative explanation. If these numbers were driven by people rating big brands harshly on principle, Firestone and Midas and the dealership down the road would take the same beating. They don't. Whatever produces a 0.71-star penalty for chain pharmacies leaves chain mechanics almost untouched.
Self-storage runs backwards. Chain self-storage facilities rate 0.16 stars higher than independent ones — the only reversal in the set, and not a marginal one given it rests on 25,329 chain and 12,871 independent listings. It is also the category in this list where what you are buying is least like a service and most like infrastructure: a locked unit, a gate code, a camera. Where the product is a box rather than a person, the chain's professional management appears to be an advantage rather than a cost.
It is not review volume
The obvious objection is that chains accumulate far more reviews, and heavily-reviewed businesses regress toward the mean while lightly-reviewed ones sit high on a handful of friendly ratings. Hotels fit that story — chain hotels carry a median of 514 reviews against 105 for independents.
But the gap survives inside every review-count band we tested, in all four categories checked — 18 of 18 bands positive.
| Reviews | Gyms | Hotels | Pharmacies | Coffee shops |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1–9 | +0.23 | +0.44 | +0.62 | +0.55 |
| 10–49 | +0.23 | +0.48 | +0.72 | +0.58 |
| 50–199 | +0.27 | +0.49 | +0.73 | +0.57 |
| 200–999 | +0.36 | +0.26 | +0.32 | +0.46 |
| 1,000+ | +0.37 | +0.09 | — | +0.42 |
Pharmacies settle it directly: chain pharmacy listings carry a median of 7 reviews against 10 for independents — fewer, not more — and still show the widest gap in the study. The volume story predicts the opposite.
The numbers are floors, not ceilings
Our classifier makes two kinds of mistake, and both shrink the measured gap.
A franchise system where each franchisee runs their own website gets counted as a pile of independents — a mechanism we documented earlier in this series, where one plumbing brand ran roughly seven domains across thirty locations. That drags chain-quality listings into the independent group. Meanwhile a genuine local business with two locations gets counted as a chain, dragging independent-quality listings the other way.
If both errors bias toward zero, tightening the definition of "chain" should widen the gap. It does.
| Category | ≥2 locations | ≥5 | ≥20 | ≥100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pharmacy | +0.67 | +0.71 | +0.75 | +0.77 |
| coffee_shop | +0.52 | +0.59 | +0.62 | +0.64 |
| dentist | +0.16 | +0.33 | +0.41 | +0.46 |
| bakery | +0.42 | +0.47 | +0.48 | +0.50 |
| hotel | +0.38 | +0.40 | +0.40 | +0.40 |
| gym | +0.29 | +0.31 | +0.31 | +0.32 |
| hair_salon | +0.19 | +0.21 | +0.21 | +0.21 |
| auto_repair_shop | +0.06 | +0.06 | +0.06 | +0.03 |
What we could not explain
The spread is the real puzzle. Why does being a chain cost 0.71 stars in pharmacy and nothing in auto repair? We had a tidy story — that the penalty is largest where the product is most commoditized, so a prescription is a prescription and all that remains is service — and we could not support it.
Rather than hand-label industries by "commoditization", which would have let us grade our own homework, we tested the gap against three things already measured in the data across all 16 categories:
| Candidate explanation | Correlation with gap |
|---|---|
| Chain share of the category | +0.28 |
| Chain-to-independent review ratio | −0.25 |
| Category's overall rating spread | +0.58 |
The first two are weak enough to discard. The third is moderate but close to circular: in a category where ratings are spread out, any difference between two groups will tend to be larger, so it describes the arithmetic rather than the cause.
So we are reporting a robust pattern with no established mechanism. The commoditization story may still be right — it just isn't evidence yet, and this series has been wrong twice recently on exactly this kind of plausible-sounding middle step.
How we did this, and the caveats
| Decision | What we did |
|---|---|
| Source | Crawlora's Google Business index, 132M+ listings, queried directly rather than through paginated search so every category is a complete count |
| Population | US listings with a website, in a given category, carrying a real rating |
| Chain definition | Website domain appearing on 5+ listings in that category; independent = domain appearing exactly once |
| Excluded | Domains appearing 2–4 times, so the two groups never touch |
Unrated listings are excluded, and getting this wrong nearly broke the study. A rating of 0
in this data means never rated, not rated zero. In veterinary care, 27.5% of listings are
unrated; counting those zeros as ratings dropped the category mean from 4.43 to 3.21 and produced
a completely different first answer. Any analysis of this field has to drop them explicitly.
Some cells are thin. Veterinary care has only 65 chain listings at this threshold and car dealers 800; treat those two gaps as indicative. Every other category rests on thousands per side.
Ratings measure who chose to review, not quality. A business that asks happy customers for a review outscores one that doesn't, and we cannot separate solicitation from satisfaction. If chains and independents solicit at systematically different rates, that is a live alternative explanation for part of the gap, and nothing here rules it out.
Domain is a proxy for ownership, not ownership itself. It cannot see a private-equity roll-up that leaves each practice's website alone — a pattern this series has documented repeatedly in dentistry and veterinary care. Those owners sit in the independent column here.
This is not a like-for-like comparison of comparable businesses. Chain and independent pharmacies differ in location, hours, staffing and customer mix, not only in ownership. The gap is a description of what people rate, not an estimate of what changes if a chain buys your local shop.
Check an industry yourself
The Google Business dataset behind this analysis carries rating, review count, category, website and geography on 132M+ listings — enough to run this comparison on any market you care about. 2,000 free credits a month, no card.
Related reading
Frequently asked questions
Do independent businesses really get better Google ratings than chains?
In 15 of the 16 US categories we measured, yes. Across 569,422 rated listings the median independent advantage is 0.31 stars, ranging from 0.71 in pharmacies down to 0.06 in auto repair. Self-storage is the single reversal, where chains rate 0.16 stars higher. These are complete counts of every rated listing in each category, not samples.
Isn't this just because chains have more reviews?
No. The gap survives inside matched review-count bands in all 18 bands tested across four categories. Pharmacies settle it directly: chain pharmacy listings carry a median of 7 reviews against 10 for independents — fewer, not more — and still show the widest gap in the study. The review-volume explanation predicts the opposite of what we observe.
Why does self-storage go the other way?
Chain self-storage facilities rate 0.16 stars above independents, on 25,329 chain and 12,871 independent listings, so it is not a small-sample fluke. Self-storage is also the category in our set where the product is least like a service and most like infrastructure — a locked unit, a gate code, a camera. Where you are buying a box rather than a person, professional chain management appears to be an advantage.
Could this just be people disliking big brands?
That is the obvious objection, and auto repair rules it out. Chain mechanics and car dealerships show essentially no penalty at all, +0.06 stars each. If anti-chain sentiment drove these ratings it would hit Firestone and Midas the same way it hits CVS. It does not, which means something category-specific is happening rather than a blanket bias against corporate brands.
What explains why the gap is bigger in some industries?
We do not know, and we tested for it. Rather than hand-labelling industries, we correlated the gap against three things already measured in the data across all 16 categories: chain share of the category (+0.28), the chain-to-independent review ratio (-0.25), and the category's overall rating spread (+0.58). The first two are too weak to use and the third is near-circular, since wider rating spread mechanically permits wider group differences. The pattern is robust; the mechanism is unestablished.