When you’re grabbing dinner on your way home from work, do you stop by a fast food chain, or an independent restaurant? How easy is it to “eat local” in Columbia?
We took a look at the Restaurant Chaininess Map (made by a lab at Georgia Tech’s Center for Spatial Analysis and Visualization) to see how many restaurants in Columbia are considered chains.
The map scores cities based on the number of other restaurants that share their name in the US — so if we opened a restaurant called COLAtoday, we would have a score of 1, while McDonald’s has a chaininess score of over 10,000.
On the map, the darker red dots are chains + the yellow dots are independent restaurants.
When you search for Columbia (using the box in the bottom left), the map zooms to the greater Columbia metro. It gives the total number of restaurants pictured in this area + their average chaininess score — 1,405 restaurants, with a chaininess score of 1,533.
So is that score high or low? Let’s compare. Charlotte has a chaininess score of 1,186 out of 2,533 restaurants. Pretty similar. If you go up north to somewhere like Boston (hey BOStoday), the scores start getting lower — 615 out of 7,737 restaurants. Does it shock you that Columbia has a higher Chaininess score than both Charlotte + Boston?
We looked at the numbers of a few fast food chains in Columbia, and Wendy’s appears to have the most locations in the capital city, with 11 restaurants + Bojangles was a close second at 10.
McDonalds has six locations, Cookout has five, and Sonic has five.
When zooming into the map a little more, the red spots in Columbia are still clustered, but Downtown appears more yellow.