Black Friday by the Numbers: Why Walmart Dominates

It’s Walmart’s world; we just shop in it. And on no other day is this more evident than Black Friday, the unofficial-yet-unavoidable shopping holiday following Thanksgiving (November 27, if you’re marking your calendar).

And the reason is simple: scale.

The following wicked awesome map was created by CartoDB, a free Web-based data visualization tool, to show how Walmart has spread like a virus throughout the US since it opened its first store in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962.

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Each dot represents approximately 5 of WalMart’s nearly 5,500 US retail locations. (You can find the full interactive map at CartoDB’s website.)

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Sure, all the big retailers – Costco, Target, Best Buy, Kohls, etc – compete to siphon more dollars from your pocket while you’re still recovering from a tryptophan coma. But none have the reach of Walmart, the world’s largest corporation, ranked first on the Fortune Global 500.

Last year, the company hauled in more than $480 billion in revenue. To put that in perspective, Walmart is the equivalent of around five Amazons, nearly seven Googles — err, Alphabets — and more than 38 Facebooks.

(It is not, however, the most profitable US company. That distinction belongs to Apple, which pocketed nearly $40 billion last year after expenses. Walmart raked in a mere $16.3 billion in profits.)

Not since Pope Gregory has any entity had the ability to alter the calendar like Walmart. Last year, the store’s “Black Friday” sale started at 6 pm on a Thursday and lasted until close of business on Cyber Monday.

Some 22 million people — a shade less than the entire population of Taiwan — shopped at a Walmart store during that period, says the company. According to an October 2015 survey by DealNews, more than six out of ten shoppers who plan to brave the retail jungle on Black Friday 2015 will pass through WalMart’s doors.

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Surveys sponsored by the National Retail Federation report that shoppers spent an average of $380 per person at retail during the holiday, putting Walmart’s 2014 Black Friday haul in the neighborhood of $8.4 billion.

And its not just brick and mortar sales. While Amazon still rules the online roost, Walmart.com is a strong second. The company reported its strongest cyber monday ever in 2014, serving up more than 1.5 billion pages on a single day. Seventy percent of its customers shopped via a mobile app.

And maybe that’s for the best. Walmart also accounts for 66 percent of all injuries sustained during Black Friday shopping since 2006, including 1 death, according to the unofficial Black Friday Death Count website.

Shopping online or via phone makes it less likely you’ll get trampled or hit with pepper spray. But if you do decide to venture out to the Big Blue box store, be careful out there. You’ll be among millions.

More Black Friday News:

Dan Tynan makes it a point to go nowhere near Walmart on days of any color. You can harangue him on Twitter.