St. Patrick's Day Bars Ranked By Type Of Visitor

This is part two of a series. Read part one.

Recently Safegraph announced their March datathon focused on analyzing foot traffic trends at Chicago bars during St. Patrick's Day.

Describing the types of visitors to a location historically has been rather subjective, but with the combination of mobile location data and a household-level social segmentation we can tackle this question mathematically.

In this blog, we segmented each visit to Chicago bars in the March Safegraph patterns dataset by matching the home block group of the visitor to the dominant segment of that block group. We sorted to the top 50% of visited bars and then ranked them by their percentage visits from each segment family. We will explore five of distinct segment families in this blog:

We will then include a dot density map showing the households in that segment and their top five bars.

Bars With The Wealthiest Visitors

Where are Chicago’s wealthiest going to celebrate St. Patricks? Some of these locations may not be surprising, like The Signature Room at the 95, a cocktail bar with great views. But evidently the desire for hookah, beer, and belgian fries doesn’t diminish with the amount of dollars in your pocket.

Young Professional Singles 

Young professionals of Chicago flock to the “authentic” feel of neighborhood dive bars. They also tend to travel in packs, making up nearly 50% of the patrons of these establishments during the month of March.

Hispanic Bars

Everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day. These are the top bars visited by segments that are primarily Hispanic. Four of these bars are uniquely clustered in the same neighborhood within a mile of each other.

Retired Folk

These five bars are where you will find snowbirds flying back from their warmer climates. They don’t come in droves, but sometimes make up as much as 16% of the bar’s patrons. Gone are the dive bars, replaced by the Booze Hound (where you can bring your dog) and the Drunken Bean (a coffee and wine bar). Overall these older folk prefer a much more laid back scene.

Rural Folk

We were surprised to see how far rural folk were willing to go to visit these bars. Two are in close proximity but the other three are near downtown. 

Conclusion

The PersonaLive segmentation puts the heaviest weight on an individual’s behavior to segment them into one of 80 segments and 17 families (5 of which are represented here). The behavioral element really came to the surface in this segmentation. We found it interesting that the young professionals predominantly chose “authentic” feeling dive bars, retired folks liked a more laid back environment, and although wealthy people have more money, they still greatly enjoyed beer and fries. Perhaps a purely demographic approach may have given us much more straightforward results, but humans are complex and it is good to capture that. Demographics are important, but they aren’t the whole story. 

If you’d like to see how segmenting the visitors to your location can play out in your site selection, retail merchandising, or target marketing strategy, book a demo here.