As a consumer, Yelp provides helpful information when you’re looking to visit a business for the first time. Whether it’s looking for a new place to eat Chinese food, a new gym to join, or a place to get your haircut – Yelp is a great resource for making a very personal decision on whether or not you want to visit a business.
Yelp data becomes fascinating when you take a macro view. This requires scraping business data across hundreds of American cities. By doing this, we have one of the richest business datasets that covers a majority of America. One of the major benefits of having a dataset like this is that we can answer questions we might be curious about such as:
What regions or cities of the US have the highest concentration of gun and ammo shops?
In this article, I wanted to focus the spotlight on Southern California.
3 graphs tell the story
Graph 1: Residents per gun shop
Below, we have the top 25 cities ranked by their number of gun shops per capita. Amongst the top 15 cities, five are located in Southern California. In Burbank and El Cajon, we have one gun shop per 13,000 residents.
To put things in perspective, we can always compare the prevalence of any business to the ubiquitousness of Starbucks. Burbank is amongst one of the highest Starbucks-per-capita in the US, with a Starbucks store for every 5.2k residents. The fact that there is around 1 gun store per every 2.5 Starbucks stores is pretty amazing.
Graph 2: Gun Shop Density
Next, we have a much more convincing graph on why SoCal is clearly the region of America that is the most obsessed with guns. When we rank cities by the number of gun shops per square mile, 9 of the top 25 cities are located in Southern California.
Graph 3: Gun Shop Favorability
One last metric that we must consider is how consumers rate and review local businesses. In order to do this, we can average store reviews for each city. SoCal shines once again. People living in Socal are generally pretty favorable on their gun shops, with 10 cities below.
What’s Next?
The data above clearly reveals two interesting findings:
- There is a high concentration of gun shops in Southern California. Much higher than other regions of the US.
- Gun shops in Southern California tend to be well-liked.
However, there is a limitation to Yelp data just because it focuses on businesses. A more thorough research can help paint a more holistic picture on SoCal’s obsession with guns. Things that would be interesting to look into can include:
- Does more gun shops correlate with more gun violence?
- Is there a prevalent gun Culture in LA – can we look at NRA membership, gun range data, meetup events, Facebook group data?
- What led to the large concentration of gun shops here? Are laws less strict?
- There’s a lot of gun shops. But how many Guns are actually sold?
- How many gun permits were issued?
Conclusion
Yelp data can be a fascinating peek at the kinds of businesses that make up America. While this article only considers trends around gun shops, there is a lot more that we can explore using this type of data – how can we run this type of analysis for different categories of businesses?
A note on data
For this article, I relied on two data sources:
- American city dataset: For this, I used Wikipedia’s _List of United States cities by population,_ which lists 317 of America’s most populous cities using 2019 Census estimates.
2. Yelp data: I use Yelp’s API to loop through all 317 cities above. I only search for businesses under the "guns and ammo" category.
