We Made a List of America's 150 Favorite Mom & Pop Shops. Did Your Local Gem Make the Cut? With Foursquare, we chose 150 small, independent businesses that epitomize main street America, bringing people together and making their communities more vibrant.
This story appears in the September 2024 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
Local businesses are beloved, but rarely get the full recognition they deserve. We want to fix that.
That's why Entrepreneur partnered with Foursquare to build this, our second annual list — featuring 150 of the most beloved small businesses across the U.S.
To create this list, we leveraged places data from Foursquare — a geospatial technology company that captures more than 100 attributes about local businesses, including foot traffic, ratings, photos taken by customers, and even how many people leave tips. We limited our search to independently owned and operated businesses in the U.S. with a maximum of four locations, and which were marked open as of May 15, 2024. We then divided the top results into 10 categories (retail, nightlife, dining, and so on), and ranked the businesses based on a variety of factors that reflect their popularity.
Mom-and-pop shops can only appear on our list once, so we removed any businesses that appeared on 2023's list.
We hope you'll use this list for at least two purposes: You can have a great time visiting wonderful local businesses, and you can learn from the many things their entrepreneurial owners do right. Of course, we know these aren't the only beloved mom-and-pop shops in America — which is why, next year, we're excited to anoint another 150.
