Visualizing McDonald's' Global Expansion

I was inspired by a few animated gifs that I saw recently so I decided to make one of my own. For this project, I sought out a way to effectively visualize how Mcdonald's expanded throughout the world. To do this, I created a heatmap of the world and using animations I was able to efficiently map out how McDonald's became more popular over time.

The data I am using is from this Wikipedia page. It took a small amount of manual cleaning before I could import it into R just because some of the countries' spellings from this article did not match with what is used in the R 'maps' package.

library(ggplot2)
library(maps)
library(mapproj)
library(lubridate)
library(animation)

mcdonalds <- read.csv("mcdonalds.csv", header = TRUE)
mcdonalds$region <- mcdonalds$Country
mcdonalds <- mcdonalds[, 2:3]

world <- map_data("world")

merged.data <- merge(world, mcdonalds, sort=FALSE, by = "region")
merged.data <- merged.data[order(merged.data$order), ]
merged.data$Year <- as.numeric(merged.data$Year)

plotIfStore <- function(x) {

 df = subset(merged.data, Year <= x)

 g <- ggplot() + geom_path(aes(x = long, y = lat, group = group), 
                 data = world)

 g <- g + ggtitle("Growth of Mcdonalds from 1940-2011")

 g <- g + geom_polygon(aes(x = long, y = lat, group = group, fill = "red"),
                  data = df)

 g <- g + annotate("text", x = 220, y = 0, label = x, col = "blue")

 g <- g + theme(legend.position = "none")

 g <- g + xlab(NULL) + ylab(NULL)

 g <- g + theme(panel.grid.minor=element_blank(), panel.grid.major=element_blank())

 g <- g + opts(axis.text.x = theme_blank(), axis.text.y = theme_blank())
}

plot <- function(x) print(plotIfStore(x))

ani.options(ani.width = 621, ani.height = 357)
     
saveGIF(for (i in 1940:2011) plot(i), convert = "gm convert",
       cmd.fun = shell, clean = T, outdir = getwd())

The .gif starts from year 1940 - the year when the first McDonald's opened in the US. There is a bit of downtime between 1940 and 1967 before McDonald's expands to Canada. After that, the company rapidly takes off all over the globe.

The animation package is phenomenal and makes use of GraphicsMagick. That part alone took me over an hour to figure out because command line typing on Windows is absolutely terrible.

Frank Portman