Ever travel outside the Rose City and notice a sizable difference in chain restaurants? And we’re not talking about the magic of Burgerville.
Friendly Cities Lab, a research group at Georgia Tech, has developed an interactive map that allows you to tour the US and compare a metro area’s average chaininess based on some pretty simple math — and it turns out Portland’s score is pretty low. That’s a good thing for diners who love supporting local businesses.
How it works
To calculate a city’s chaininess score, the lab examines each restaurant and explores how many outposts there are in the continental US by counting establishments with the same name. For example, McDonald’s has a score over 13,000 because it has so many locations — whereas independent restaurants often have scores as low as 1 and local franchises like Salt & Straw’s score would be 25 (that’s including locations in Washington, Oregon, California + Florida). Then, the map averages all of those scores and assigns a value to the highlighted area.
Where Portland ranks
- National — 797,419 restaurants, average chaininess of 1,247
- Seattle — 4,375 restaurants, average chaininess of 490
- Boston — 7,737 restaurants, average chaininess of 615
- Portland — 4,091 restaurants, average chaininess of 633
- Denver — 4,941 restaurants, average chaininess of 1,057
- Indianapolis — 2,426 restaurants, average chaininess of 1,609
Behind the numbers
Our biggest chain is Starbucks with at least 50 storefronts as of April 2022.
Meanwhile, Subway has 43 locations within city limits, Taco Bell has 20, Wendy’s has nine, and McDonald’s has eight.
