Did you know that you can use Google Maps to see how busy a store is throughout its opening hours, but also how busy it is now?
If time is not an issue and you can visit the restaurant or the bar or generally a shop at any time during its opening hours, why not go at an off-peak time to be better served?
When a store is least crowded is easy to find with just a few clicks. Even see its movement live the moment you control it.
Google Maps can give you all this information as long as you learn to work online and in the information below, which is not visible on the home screen.
Google Maps offers you this exact same information, whether you are doing your research on your desktop computer or simply on your mobile. In other words, you have gone for a walk and decided to go eat at a certain restaurant. You can see from your mobile whether it is worth going now or not. It works almost forever, even for parks.
So open Google Maps, search for the store you are interested in and click on the name of the business that will appear on the Map to get more information about it. In the left column (on a desktop machine) that will open, stay on the “Overview” tab scroll down and look for the “Popular Times” graph.
You will see a graph with blue bars indicating the usual traffic for each hour of operation and with a red bar the traffic it has right now, live.
You can also click on the day name and select another day of the week to check when the site is usually busiest. Do more people tend to shop on Wednesdays or Sundays? Is the store less busy early in the morning or late at night? The chart will tell you.
This information is not available for every location, but you will find it for most of the locations you want to visit. Google does not track and transmit this information for sites that are not "frequently visited" by people who have Google's "location history" enabled.
How does it work;
This feature takes advantage of location data received by Google by people who choose to turn on Google location history on their phones. Using this data, Google will estimate how busy a particular site is currently.
It also remembers historical data and can tell you an average of that location's traffic for the entire week to show you when a store is typically busiest (or least) busy each day.
Google uses a similar methodology to monitor traffic conditions on the roads and captures it in its Maps.
Dimitris hates Mondays...
