Taos County’s 10 most visited businesses in 2021
Taos County’s new Economic Development Director Patti Sunday has been hard at work in her first month on the job, assembling data that will help her develop a strategy to attract private investors to the county.
To start, she began by developing a list of the top ten businesses in terms of visitation numbers for 2021. She said she decided not to differentiate between local visits and tourist visits. Instead, her breakdown looks at total visitations regardless of age, hometown, or any other factor. She also chose not to list the total numbers for the business’ sake.
Here are the top 10:
• Albertsons
• Walmart
• Smith’s
• Taos Ski Valley
• Red River Ski Area
• Walgreens
• McDonald’s
• Red River Brewing Company
• Holy Cross Hospital
• Sonic Drive-In
Sunday said that by putting this list together, she can start to get a picture of the community as a whole, and begin to see where people chose to go during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Even in a pandemic, when consumer habits change, we can learn things,” she said. “We always want to continue to look at data during all different cycles. Sometimes it isolates things.”
While Sunday did not differentiate between types of visitors, she suspects total numbers are primarily made up of local residents, since tourism was still down in 2021, despite seeing some modest regrowth. “[The pandemic] took a lot of the tourists out, which allows me to see what’s important to citizens.”
Looking through the top 10 list, there are two of the businesses on the list Sunday said she is “very excited about as it relates to economic development”: Red River Brewing Company and Sonic Drive-In. She explained that both are interesting for different reasons.
In the case of Red River Brewing Company, Sunday said seeing it on the list is a good sign. She said part of its success is likely due to its location, its branding and its price points. “I like their outside. That fire pit makes people linger, and lingering psychologically gives you belonging, and belonging makes brand loyalty,” she said.
She also pointed to its food. “When you look at their menu, it has some entry level price points that you could get—that’s $15 or $12 on average, which is still kind of the tolerance,” she said, noting that many restaurants have higher prices that cater to a tourist crowd. “If everyone is at the tourism, artisan, special restaurant price point, you just narrowed the marketplace,” she said of those who can afford to lower their prices. “How many restaurants with a per person average of $30 or $25 can we tolerate as citizens?”
When looking at Sonic DriveIn, the other surprise on the list, Sunday said she thinks its business model is “fascinating.” While she expected mainstays like McDonald’s to be on the list, Sonic was a bit of a surprise.
“Sonic keeps their prices low because they have the benefit of being a national chain and buying big and so forth,” she said. “They are also a very good case study of ‘know your customer’ and ‘keep your brand fresh.’ ”
She said because of their price points and their changing menu, they were in a good position to weather the various economic hardships.
“So here’s Sonic, a big corporation, and then here’s the opposite of that, Red River Brewing, and they both made the top 10,” she said.
From here, she can begin to break down what has worked and what hasn’t when it comes to expanding business in Taos County. She hopes to “analyze the churn,” or the turnover rate of local businesses. “Are we over coffee’d, under coffee’d; over gas stations; under hotels?” she questioned. The data will give the answers, she said. “The data is the data is the data.”
This information, she said, will show where consumers want to spend time, as well as “where we might need to be growing.”
Following her analysis of the top 10 businesses in the county by visitation, Sunday plans to generate several other reports. One report will analyze local independent businesses, comparing them from 2018 to now. Then, she plans to do a study on trails and the “eco-consumer.”
Overall, in her role she hopes to bring “some of the best practices from the private money world” into the local economy.