Three Ways of Visualizing the Growth of Walmart

It’s a wonderful thing when people make interesting data sets available to the public. When Thomas Jones wrote a paper in Econometrics about the growth of US retail giant Walmart, he made the data he collected about every Walmart store opening in history (location and date) available to the public. Since then, several people have used different techniques to visualize the data. 

It’s a wonderful thing when people make interesting data sets available to the public. When Thomas Jones wrote a paper in Econometrics about the growth of US retail giant Walmart, he made the data he collected about every Walmart store opening in history (location and date) available to the public. Since then, several people have used different techniques to visualize the data. 

Biostatistician Corey Chivers used the R language to create this animation of the growth of the mega-retailer over time:

Corey used an R script to create this animation above, which you could easily adapt to other geolocated data to show accumulation over time.

FlowingData’s Nathan Yau used Actionscript to create a similar animation (including both Walmart and Sam’s Club openings; Sam’s Club is the big-box warehouse variant of Walmart) a while back.

Finally, this animated GIF of Walmart store openings appeared at the blog All That is Interesting. It was created using Excel.

Many thanks go to Thomas Jones for making the source data available for everyone to use.