How far do people drive for a brand?

Every store has a catchment: the area its visitors come from. For most chains it is small. The typical Costco, Trader Joe’s or Macy’s visitor comes from a short drive away, and the store is chosen because it is on the way.

A handful of brands work the other way round. People plan around them. They are the reason for the stop, sometimes the reason for the trip. We wanted to know which brands those are and how big the difference is, so we took the trade areas ↗ of 47 US chains, covering more than 76,000 stores, and measured how far their visitors travelled.

The headline: at the average Buc-ee’s, one in three visitors comes from 50 miles or more away, and one in five from more than 100 miles. At the average Costco it is one in thirteen. At Macy’s and Nordstrom, roughly one in seventeen. Every chain figure in this post is that kind of number: the average across the chain’s stores, so a chain with 20,000 locations and one with 40 are compared on equal footing.

The league table

Resorts, campgrounds, casinos and theme parks are left out on purpose. They are destinations by definition, and the few chains among them big enough to measure, such as KOA campgrounds and Great Wolf Lodge, land between Buc-ee’s and the truck stops. This is a ranking of places you might drive to on the way to somewhere, and of everyday chains for contrast.

Three things stand out, and one needs explaining.

Truck stops are the ceiling. At TravelCenters of America, Pilot and Love’s, 60 to 70 percent of visitors come from more than 50 miles away, and most of those from more than 100. That is not loyalty, it is the interstate: nearly everyone there was already on the road. It is what “far away” looks like when almost no one is local, and the mark to read the rest of the chart against.

Buc-ee’s is not alone. Cracker Barrel, Kwik Trip, Sheetz and Waffle House each get 18 to 25 percent of their visitors from 50-plus miles, half to three quarters of Buc-ee’s share. None of them is a place people plan a trip around. They are built beside the roads people are already driving, and that alone gives them a road-trip crowd.

Outdoor retail travels; urban retail does not. Cabela’s, Scheels, Bass Pro Shops and Tractor Supply sit in the 15 to 22 percent band. Every department store, beauty chain, grocer and warehouse club sits under 10 percent. IKEA, with only fifty US stores, is a brand people plan a trip to, yet it sits at 8 percent, the same as Target. Not because nobody drives to IKEA: those fifty stores all sit inside big metros, so the whole metro is within 50 miles of one. People do cross town for it, and its share of visitors from 25-plus miles is a little above Target’s, but they rarely cross the state.

And Dollar General is not a destination, even though it ranks like one. At 16 percent it sits above Walmart, Target and Costco, and Tractor Supply and Casey’s rank high for the same reason: their stores are in the countryside, where everyone’s visitors come from further away. In a county with fewer than 25 people per square mile a third of any store’s visitors come from 50-plus miles; in a dense city it is one in thirty. Put Dollar General next to Walmart inside the same county and, surprisingly, the share of far-away visitors is nearly the same, 18% against 19%. Walmart’s visitors do travel a bit further on average, but that gap is small next to the gap between counties: the far-away share comes with the place, not the store. Buc-ee’s, Cracker Barrel and the outdoor chains keep their lead once you allow for that; the rural chains lose theirs.

How we measured it

The numbers come from Pine59’s ZIP-level home trade areas ↗ for April to June 2026: for every store, the share of its visitors whose home area is each ZIP code, measured as a straight line from the store to the centre of the ZIP area, then averaged across each chain’s stores. The 47 chains were picked by hand to span the kinds of place people drive to; stores where fewer than three quarters of visitors could be matched to a ZIP area, and chains with fewer than 20 stores left, are not shown. The full method, with code you can run on any chain in the catalog, is in the docs: Measuring how far visitors travel to Buc-ee’s, Costco, and three other chains ↗.

What we know, and what we do not

Pine59 measures places and populations, not people. Nothing in this post is derived from an individual’s movements, and no Pine59 dataset contains, or can be used to derive, where any person lives or works. The home areas behind the trade areas are inferred at the level of a neighbourhood-sized zone from aggregated activity patterns, they exist only as an input to group statistics, any home area representing fewer than a minimum number of visitors is suppressed entirely, and published figures are rounded. Depending on the signal, aggregation begins before the data reaches us. The question “where does this person live?” is not answerable from Pine59 data, by us or by anyone else.

If you want the detail, read the docs pages on home and work inference ↗, extrapolation ↗ and our privacy approach ↗, or the short version on how Pine59 is designed for places.