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Retail brand
observatory.

1,389 brands · Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg

Where a chain actually stands on the ground, and how much of the population it really reaches. Up to three networks on the same map, in any covered country — which is the only way to tell a saturated market from an open one.

Coverage: Population reached; not a store count
Comparison: 3 brands; on one national map
Footprint: Weight by area; where the network concentrates
Momentum: Opening rhythm; the trajectory, not the size

Retail brands to compare — three at most

Country

Coverage radius

Mapping the national network…

Pick one to three retail brands: the tool maps their national footprint and measures the share of the population they reach.

Locations: Foursquare Open Places, resolved through our brand reference · population: IRIS centroids in France, Kontur H3 grid elsewhere. Location counts are orders of magnitude — a single store can generate several Foursquare points (drive-through, garden centre, service desk), which inflates the count, especially in big-box retail. Conversely, regional networks are less well referenced and come out understated. Population coverage and comparisons between brands of similar size are unaffected by these biases.

Method

What the numbers do and do not say .

Locations

Foursquare Open Places, filtered to the country and de-duplicated at 200 metres per brand. No source carries a clean chain field, so the brand reference is the real asset: a curated set of patterns, built country by country, that turns commercial names into networks.

Population

IRIS centroids in France, Kontur H3 grid elsewhere — one mesh per country, and the same code consuming all of them, so a coverage percentage means the same thing on either side of a border. Cells with no centroid still count in the denominator: dropping them would lift every published French coverage figure by about 1.8 % without a single store opening.

Calibration, and its limits

Counts are confronted with the network sizes brands publish. In France the bias is consistently upward on big-box retail — Decathlon +50 %, Intermarché +59 %. In Luxembourg it is dispersed both ways, from 0.57 to 1.39, because networks with ancillary points are overcounted while small formats are undercounted. There is no single factor that would fix either. The countries opened most recently are not yet calibrated, and their pages say so.

Frequently asked questions about the observatory

Tout ce que vous devez savoir sur nos solutions.

What exactly does population coverage measure?

The share of a country's inhabitants living within the chosen radius of at least one location of the brand. Each population cell is counted once, however many stores reach it. This is the most robust figure the tool produces, because it does not depend on the exact number of stores: a store counted twice does not cover twice as many people.

Which countries are covered?

Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg. The raw material is the same everywhere — Foursquare Open Places — but the brand reference is curated country by country, because patterns do not travel: applied blind to Switzerland, the French reference credited "La Poste" with 1,632 locations that in fact belong to Die Post, a different company.

Why does the radius matter so much?

Because a 10 km radius saturates in a small dense country. Measured across the fifteen largest networks, coverage spans 4.4 percentage points in Luxembourg and 6.3 in Belgium — the indicator stops telling brands apart. It spans 21 points in France, where it works well. The country pages pick their headline radius from the measured spread rather than from convention, and say so on the page.

Are the location counts exact store numbers?

No, and the tool says so rather than hiding it. A single store can generate several Foursquare points — drive-through, garden centre, service desk — which inflates big-box retail. Regional chains are referenced less well and come out understated. Where the counts have been checked against published network sizes, the ratio ranges from 0.57 to 1.39. Use them to rank and compare, not to state a store count.

Can I export the locations?

Yes. The export returns brand, town, postcode, administrative area and coordinates in CSV, for up to three brands at a time, in exchange for a work email.

Country files