US retail expansion — which chains are opening stores fastest, and where

The measure this page ranks on, brand by brand and step by step. In the app these are five brands' dots flying onto a globe.

• Verified openings: stores that are new to the index AND were created inside the quarter, normalized to 91 days because the vintages are unevenly spaced. Not a count difference — a raw store count can climb because the index's coverage of a chain is catching up, which looks identical to that chain opening doors.
• Openings carry the index vintage that first recorded the store, not the day it opened. Order is meaningful between quarters only; inside a quarter it is the order the index wrote the rows.
• Steps are the differences between the eight count vintages, so there are seven of them and their lengths are unequal. Divide a step's openings by its days and multiply by 91 to compare two steps.
• Batch-suspect is the openings-weighted share of a brand's records created on an index-wide vendor ingest day or in the concentrated top days of a step. It impeaches TIMING claims, not existence: 7 Brew files its new stores in bulk and its 481 openings are hand-checked against the chain's own locator.
• An empty row is not shown. A brand with no openings series has not been measured, which is a different fact from a brand measured at zero.
• Counted as index records, not locations: this domain's rows include departments inside one store — fuel, pharmacy, optical, tire, food court — each indexed separately.

The raw index counts the openings above are checked against. Fetched on every row of the ranking and shown nowhere in the app.

• Net new is the index's raw count movement across the 8-quarter window, which includes coverage catch-up as well as openings. It is not a count of store openings.
• An empty cell is a vintage in which the index carried no row for that brand. It is not a zero — a gap is left explicit rather than interpolated.
• To index a row to 100, divide each vintage by the first NON-ZERO one and multiply by 100. A brand whose first vintage is zero has no denominator there, so its baseline is the first measured vintage and it enters at 0 rather than on the shared 100 line.
• This is the measurement the verified-openings rewrite exists to correct. A 10-brand audit against the chains' own store locators graded 8 of 10 count-diffed rows wrong; 7 Brew published +932% against a real ~+161%.

One row per verified store opening, newest first, for the fastest openers in the index. The map has the city and the state of each of these and can show you neither.

• Showing 500 of 3,127 openings, newest first.
• The brands covered are the five the app stars on its globe — the largest verified-openings totals in the ranked pool — extended in rank order to 12: 7 Brew Coffee, Chick-fil-A, ALDI, Tropical Smoothie Cafe, AutoZone, Cava, Tractor Supply Co., Burlington, Five Below, Paris Baguette, Dutch Bros Coffee, Wawa. It is a stated slice, not a sample: the totals beside each brand above are that brand's own, not a count of the rows here.
• Detected is the index vintage that first carried the store, NOT the day the doors opened. The store may have opened earlier and been indexed late.
• Openings carry the index vintage that first recorded the store, not the day it opened. Order is meaningful between quarters only; inside a quarter it is the order the index wrote the rows.
• First indexed is the record's own creation stamp — the second half of the double gate that makes a row an opening rather than a listing the index already had.
• The map's H3 cell ids (resolutions 6 and 8) are the storage behind its heat ramp and are not printed; the state and city tables below are the same signal in a readable form.
• Coordinates are the index's, to five decimal places — roughly a metre. They locate the record, not a lease boundary.

• The globe's heat ramp, aggregated. Counted over the openings table above, so it covers the listed brands and not the whole index — the state index further down counts every brand.
• Region comes to us as free text out of the index and carries about 0.1% junk ("Calif", "D.C.", " GA"). A value that does not resolve to a US state code is listed as it arrived rather than being guessed at.