



One half of Americans went to McDonald’s at least once in March, according to location analytics group Placed Insights. Nearly four in ten Americans visited Walmart, the next most popular business in March.



Placed Insights, a consumer habits data service provider, monitors the consumption behavior of more than 70,000 Americans ages 14 and older on a monthly basis. The data show that a handful of companies are visited by at more than one in 10 Americans each month. The companies are primarily in the fast food, discount retail and pharmacy sectors. Based on a review of Placed’s data for March 2013, these are the most visited stores in America.



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The type of businesses these companies are in plays a big part in the kind of foot traffic they get each month. According to Placed Insights, less than 40% of Americans visited a bank or clothing fashion store in March. At the same time, an estimated 60% visited a department store, and more than two-thirds went to a fast food restaurant at least once.



Placed Insights founder and CEO David Shim explained that the type of goods being sold at a business is the difference between Americans going once a year, or once a week. “People go to fast food at a high frequency. They don’t necessarily go shopping for a sweater every day, but they eat food every day.”



It should come as no surprise that most of these companies have made concerted effort to expand their products, with varying degrees of success. Walmart, for example, has expanded its business to offer groceries, and even has fast food restaurants in the store. Starbucks has expanded its menu options to include breakfast sandwiches and other meals. McDonald’s new McCafe coffee brand has been very successful. These are all new services devised to make more money on existing customers, bring in a new set of customers, and to bring them in more often.



While the type of goods and services being offered by these companies is critical, the other is their dominant national presence. These companies have thousands of locations all over the country. Rare is the American town without a McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Subway, or some combination of the three. McDonald’s had more than 14,000 locations in the U.S. in 2012, while Subway had more than 25,000 stores.



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Using figures recently published by Placed Insights, 24/7 Wall St. compiled a list of the most visited stores in America. To assess how profitable and popular these stores were, we also consulted companies’ financial statements. Same-store sales growth, systemwide sales, and other measures of store performance were provided by research firms RetailSails and Technomic. Stock prices are for the parent company that owns the store.



These are America’s most popular stores.



10. Target

> Percent visited: 14.2%

> Revenue: $73.3 billion

> 1-yr. stock price change: 27.56%

> Store category: Discount & variety stores



Target was the second most-visited discount retailer in the U.S. during March, behind only Walmart. One reason was the number of Target stores. The company has been attempting to take on Walmart by adding grocery sections to more of its stores and by offering food at competitive prices. This has helped Target maintain strong financial performance despite the weak economy and its additional spending on its launch in Canada. Most Americans surveyed by the American Customer Satisfaction Index rated Target well. It finished in a three-way tie for the second-highest rated discount store behind Nordstrom.



9. Taco Bell



> Percent visited: 18.2%

> Revenue: $13.6 billion

> 1-yr. stock price change: -3.89%

> Store category: Fast food



As recently as 2011, Taco Bell was struggling to keep competitor Chipotle from taking its customers, with flat or negative same-store sales growth in each quarter that year. This changed in early 2012, when Taco Bell released the “Doritos Locos” taco, a hard taco with a shell made of Doritos nacho chips. The taco help the company increase comparable sales in every quarter of 2012, as the company sold over 1 million such tacos per day. In March, Taco Bell operator Yum! Brands executive Greg Creed told The Daily Beast the company hired 15,000 workers just to meet demand for the taco in 2012. Last year, the company’s sales increased by $1 billion to $11.8 billion, and net income rose by roughly $300 million to $1.6 billion.



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