I pulled every independent business inside a 2500 metre circle around the Quad, dropped anything carrying a chain brand, and then tried to open each one's website. There were 121 of them. Twenty-seven had a site that answered.
What was actually measured
This matters more than the number, so it goes first. The source is OpenStreetMap, which is maintained by volunteers, and a business with no website recorded there might still have one. So the honest claim is not that ninety-four businesses near campus have no website.
The honest claim is that for ninety-four of them, a machine looking for a website does not find one. Ninety list none at all. Three list one that no longer answers. One points at a page that has been deleted.
That is the more interesting claim anyway, because it is the same question a student with a phone is asking. Nobody types a business into a search bar hoping it exists somewhere. They type it hoping something comes back.
By category
| Category | Found | Reachable site |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurants | 64 | 15 |
| Clothing | 12 | 1 |
| Barbers and salons | 11 | 3 |
| Cafes | 8 | 2 |
| Gift shops | 4 | 2 |
| Bakeries | 3 | 1 |
| Bookshops | 3 | 1 |
| Car repair | 3 | 0 |
| Phone repair | 3 | 0 |
| Bike shops | 2 | 2 |
| Ice cream | 2 | 0 |
| Laundry | 2 | 0 |
| Florists | 2 | 0 |
| Jewellers | 1 | 0 |
| Tailors | 1 | 0 |
Restaurants do best, and they still only clear one in four. Every laundry, florist, jeweller, tailor, ice cream shop, phone repair place and car repair shop in the circle came back with nothing.
The number that surprised me
Twenty-three of the 121 have opening hours recorded anywhere a machine can read them. Not a website. Just the hours.
Which means that for roughly eight in ten businesses within walking distance of forty thousand students, the answer to “are they open right now” is not available to anyone who is not already standing in front of the door.
Why this is not a sales pitch
I build websites, so the obvious read is that this is an argument for buying one from me. A few honest caveats against my own interest.
Some of these businesses genuinely do not need a website. A barber shop with a forty-year queue out the door is not being held back by its web presence. A restaurant that fills every night on word of mouth has already solved the problem a website solves.
And for many of the rest, the cheapest fix is not a website at all. It is claiming the Google listing and putting the hours in it. That is free, it takes twenty minutes, and it would move more of these businesses further than anything I could sell them.
What happens next
I am visiting these places and writing about them one at a time. Who runs it, how long it has been here, what it does well, and what a student trying to find it runs into. That is the Storefront Project, and it is reporting rather than sales: a business does not have to be a client to be in one, and several will not be.
If you run something near campus, I would like twenty minutes at your place. You get a written piece about your business either way, and no obligation to buy anything. (205) 462-7839 or elijah@purcell-ventures.com.
Method
One Overpass query against OpenStreetMap for shops and food businesses within 2500 metres of the Quad, on 20 August 2026. Anything tagged with a chain brand was dropped. Every listed website got a real HTTP request, and a 403 or a 405 was counted as working, because plenty of live sites refuse a bare HEAD. The script is scout.py and re-running it reproduces every figure above.
Correction, same day. The first version of this piece said twenty-six working sites and ninety-five without. The script was sending only a HEAD request, and two restaurants whose sites are perfectly alive answer GET but refuse HEAD, so they were counted as broken. Corrected above to twenty-seven and ninety-four. The correction stays visible rather than being edited in quietly, because the piece is about checking things.