Saturday, June 27, 2015

Mapping the Sale of Liquor


The sale of liquor in Vermont is controlled by the state’s Department of Liquor Control. There is obviously some debate as to whether the sale of liquor in Vermont should be privatized. However the fact that the industry is controlled by the state does mean that all the data surrounding the sale of liquor in Vermont is freely available.

Vermont's Seven Days has taken this data and created a map of Vermont's Best-Selling Liquor, Store by Store. Using the map you can click on any of Vermont's 80 liquor stores and discover the top 5 selling liquor brands.

The markers on the map seemed to be scaled by the volume of sales. So the larger the map marker the more liquor was sold in 2014. When you click on a marker you can also discover how the store ranks in the number of sales, the total volume of sales (in dollars) and the percentage of growth (from 2013).

I wish you could also query the map by liquor brand or by type of liquor. It would be nice for example, to see where vodka or whiskey was sold the most. The map could allow users to select a type of liquor and resize the map markers based on the volume of sales of the selected liquor type. However if you are interested in the top selling brands of liquor in Vermont Seven Days does have a chart of the top 10 selling brands in the state in this article.

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