The Rally’s – Checkers Divide (2014)

This map is a quickie to meet demand from the reddit thread about the Hardee’s – Carl’s jr map. It shows the distribution of Checkers and Rally’s restaurants across the United States. Both chains were founded independently in the 1980s and merged operations in 1999.

No plans to do any analysis of the results, but at first glance, there does not appear to be a hard trend to the placement of the restaurants. Generally though, Checkers has some strong clusters in the South, but also in the NYC and Detroit areas. Rally’s has a strong presence in the old Northwest Territory and in California, with a few islands scattered throughout Checkersland.

A few notes:

• The closest Rally’s-Checkers pairing occurs in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The Checkers on UA-Pine Bluff is but 2 km (1.2 miles), a short 5 minute drive, to the nearest Rally’s. There’s another Rally’s 4.3 km from campus.
• Texas has one Checkers location in Beaumont, but residents of El Paso are actually closer to the Rally’s locations in Arizona.
• Chicagoland has both chains. Mostly Checkers in Cook County, with one Rally’s in the south of the county. Lake County, Indiana has three additional Rally’s locations.
• One could travel over land from Sault Ste. Marie, MI to San Diego, CA and technially always be closer to a Rally’s than to a Checkers.

©Nik Freeman (mapsbynik.com) 2015
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
County geography from U.S. Census Bureau
Restaurant locations from poi-factory.com
Made with QGIS and Adobe Creative Suite
USGS National Atlas Equal Area Projection