MintData Shows Real-Time Spending Trends for U.S. Cities and Merchants

[bwooceli]

If I was a merchant, I might have some qualms about effectively having a subset of my sales revenues reported publicly.

[marklittlewood]

There are some great ways of gaming the system, especially if you can segment your customers effectively.

If everyone knows your average spend, then you can sell bargains to cheapskates and enhanced experiences to show offs...

[SriniK]

Nice to see trends. It would have been better if they had more numbers like gross per city or total number of users.

Its funny Fremont tops the list "Highest Spending Cities in the U.S" I can only think that there are more users from Fremont than there are in other cities.

Interesting trend which makes sense: In Fremont, Costco ranks at the top vs in San Fran, top 3 are restaurants.

[klochner]

meh.

Why does a metric ranked by individual customer visits have dollars as the unit?

The data has inherent selection bias in including only credit card transactions, which would almost certainly affect the choice of "most popular".

[quintinsykes]

Mint rolls up activity in transaction accounts too, not just credit cards. So debit card transactions, checks where the user provided the merchant name, and (much less likely) even cash transactions where the user bothered to categorize them are part of the data set.

I agree that merchants where cash is the most popular payment method probably aren't going to fare as well in these rankings.

[Mikecsi]

That Provides some data you wont find anywhere else! For eaxample, i wondered why fremont, ca has the highest avg spending. Looking through the data i realized there is a Frys electronics in the list. No wonder....

[xtacy]

Typo: when I searched for Walmart, the page said: "No business __mached__ walmart. Please try another search."

No Walmart.. really? :)

[sethwartak]

search for "Wal-mart"

[sstone]

nice error: http://data.mint.com/region/us