Gainesville, FL Retail & Consumer Trends 2026

Growth ranking

Fastest-growing tracked retail and consumer chains

Ranked by year-over-year growth of share of tracked local spend. Arrows show movement in the rankings since last year. Each dot in the chart is one tracked chain: bigger market position to the right, faster growth higher up, more tracked stores in a bigger dot. Colors match the store map below. Wawa and Dollar General sit in the high-growth half.

# Chain YoY growth

Rank	Chain	Rank movement	YoY growth
1	Wawa	▲2	+17.2%
2	Dollar General	▲2	+15.1%
3	Goodwill	▲6	+14.3%
4	Dollar Tree	▲7	+12.0%
5	Circle K	-	+11.3%
6	Panda Express	▲4	+11.3%
7	Exxon	▲6	+11.2%
8	AutoZone	▲4	+10.3%
9	Shell	▲1	+8.0%
10	Mavis Discount Tire	▲4	+7.5%
11	Jiffy Lube	▲5	+7.3%
12	Mi Apa Latin Cafe	▲3	+5.5%
13	KFC	▲2	+5.0%
14	Five Below	▲4	+3.4%
15	Waffle House	▲4	+2.6%

Store footprint

Store map

3,100 tracked store locations in Gainesville, FL, colored by category group. The top 5 chains by store count run 145 of the 3,100 stores (5%); 2,164 of the 2,363 tracked chains have a single store here. 4% of the tracked stores here are in leisure & travel, against 6% across Florida.