Visualizing Wal-mart

Wal-Mart opened its first store in 1962, in Rogers, Arkansas and today there are 4835 Wal-Mart stores in the United States (as of Jan 31, 2014). 

I was reading a paper called “THE DIFFUSION OF WAL-MART AND ECONOMIES OF DENSITY” describing Wal-Mart’s strategy of following a pattern that radiated from the center outward and maintaining high store density and a contiguous store network all along the way. This paper had some accompanying data detailing the growth of Wal-mart across the US from 1962 till 2006. Not a complete list obviously as it stops at store 3177 as against todays 4835. Also, the data classifies the Wal-mart store either as a Wal-mart store or as a Supercenter. There is actually a wider classification of Wal-mart stores: Supercenters, Neighborhood markets, Discount Stores, Small Formats and Sams Clubs. Curious if any of you has a pointer to a more complete list as visualized by Wal-mart here.

I took the raw data from LINK and imported it into Excel using Power Query. I then used Power View to visualize the data of the store opening over the years by format and State:

I also acquired Google Trends data to analyze and visualize the search data across Walmart, Target and Costco using Power View:

In addition to search data, I also used demographic data from Neustar to visualize and correlate Median Age, Median Income and Population data against the Walmart store locations and search data. The correlation was established by establishing relationships between the data using PowerPivot in Excel.

I used Power Map in Excel to visualize and correlate the data layers (Walmart Store Locations, Search Data By City, Median Income by Zip Code):

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a05h5R6eflY&feature=youtu.be]