COVID-19 and AggData Premium

The global pandemic has had a significant impact on retailers, restaurants and other businesses worldwide. As such, many companies that we track have seen large changes in the number of open locations, or the hours at which they operate. We have been labeling lists that are affected in these ways with a new tag. The tag will say "COVID-19" and look like the following:

Note that the tag is not just associated with a list in general, but with the specific version(s) of the list that are affected. A COVID-19 tag can mean one of 3 things:

1. The company has closed a portion of their locations. You will see a drop in the count of locations, but they are not necessarily permanently closed. In the example above, the 2020-05-19 version only has 152 locations open when Old Navy typically has around a thousand.

2. The company has closed all of their locations. Typically, if a list has no locations, we would close it entirely and not put that information up. However, there are some cases with the COVID-19 tag where, even though we don't have any locations to collect, we wanted to record a snapshot at that time, with zero locations. In the above, the 2020-04-15 version of the list is an example of this.

3. The company has not closed locations, but they have been affected in other ways. Sometimes a list will still have all of its locations open, but the hours have been significantly altered, or they only offer certain types of services, such as curbside pick-up. These will still be marked with the COVID-19 tag. Above, the June and July 2020 versions of the data show this as an example.

Currently, the Premium website is the best place to see visually which lists have been affected. There is also a “covid” field now associated with versions of lists in the /list API calls (API V2 only).