State of the Map Store: August 2025
“Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!”
On September 31 2023, I took a redeye flight from San Francisco to Boston. The next morning I got on an MBTA commuter train to Pawtucket, walked from the station to my new apartment, met my landlady, got my key, left my clothes that I’d wear for the next few weeks until my shipping unit arrived, and then continued walking on to the Map Center for the first time as the new owner. I didn’t take the day off. I didn’t even take a nap. I opened my laptop and logged in to my remote job as a GIS consultant and clocked in for a normal business day. There hasn’t been much stopping since then and that was nearly two years ago.
So how are things going? Well, there has never been a period in history where the future was certain. This is a key feature of human existence, and yet, it feels especially uncertain now. The usual business fluctuations are always in play while a thousand other new factors make even the concept of prediction laughable. This makes it very difficult to build a reasonable business plan! It’s also important to remember that my pessimism is itself a type of prediction. My State of the Map report last year, written in fairly dire terms, was written only a couple of weeks before a much needed breath of life was blown into my endeavor. I worry about the future a great deal and yet sometimes amazing, good things are also possible. Have you ever tripped and had to run for a few steps to catch yourself from falling on your face? I feel like I’ve been running like that for the last eight months. I’m exhausted but that’s largely because incrementally good things keep happening and pushing me forward. It’s exhausting and unsustainable and yet also a blessing. So while I have a sense of dread and uncertainty with each new POTUS tweet, I have to remember that good things are just as unpredictable as the bad ones. Here are some of the more important milestones of the year so far:
December 2024: BlueSky
I had a pretty unhealthy relationship with Twitter, which I logged into for the first time in 2011 in my senior year of college. In the ensuing decade or so, Twitter was my endless scroll of choice and I was definitely a bit “too online.” Imagine my despair when my favorite addiction was bought by Elon Musk and then ravaged beyond recognition. Enter BlueSky, effectively a clone of Twitter and adopted mostly by educated progressive types with fairly good manners. It has been something like Twitter methadone. I got an account in 2023 and posted the usual inane stuff I’ve always shared on social media. The thing that happened differently on December 17 was that one such inanity went viral.
You can read about the state of things for the Map Center in more detail but suffice to say I was considering exit strategies. It was the end of a long day, already pitch black and freezing outside and I wasn’t eager to brave the weather to get home. A woman opened the door looking for Jordan’s Jungle just as thousands have done before, only this time, rather than immediately turn and leave, she looked around. She had other places to be and she couldn’t linger but A map store! What an idea! I have people in my life who would love this! When she left, I described the incident just as it had happened. People went nuts for it.
Andrew’s Bluesky tweet (skeet) that says “A mom just came in SO EXCITED to find a map store bc her son would LOVE it. She tries to be coy. ‘My son is… Really into maps. Real special kid.’ I’m like, ma’am, this is a map store. Half my customers are on the spectrum. I have a trains and transit section. You’re among friends.”
Bluesky has a disproportionate number of folks on the autism spectrum and many people loved the positive feel-good story in a moment where everyone needed something a bit light-hearted. My website request for limited conversation during the day was borne out of my need to get my remote office work done but folks saw it as a sensitivity to people who are easily overwhelmed by stimuli and I had inadvertently become something of a champion of neurodivergence. My followership ballooned by about 12,000 in a matter of hours. I whipped up a quick video to explain the whole backstory and what I was about. It gathered several thousand views in hours. One of the arch-rules of the internet is to never read the comments. Well, I read every single one of them. They’re all lovely and genuine and after the year I had had, I nearly dissolved with gratitude.
It being nearly Christmas, I pulled a number of online orders and even a few donations to my Buy Me a Coffee account from people who had no idea map stores were still a thing but who desperately wished that one was nearby. I became a minor online celebrity on a very niche platform but a celebrity nonetheless.
Just a couple of days later, a Valley Breeze journalist came in to verify that my store had, in fact, been saved by a viral social media post. I think that that’s largely true. The story caught on with the Public’s Radio, the Boston Globe, a couple podcasters, a TV news segment and a local access cable personality. All of a sudden, I was in demand. Sales were up. Enthusiasm was high and I was committed to riding the wave a bit longer. I was recognized as “the Map Guy” in a local hardware store. The number of people I felt I’d be disappointing if I walked away seemed so much larger and the ceiling for how high I could go seemed a bit loftier.
A couple times a week someone comes into the store having found me on BlueSky. I’ve developed a solid fan base of online nerds who are curious about what I have to say. I have fans in other states. I have had visitors to the store from multiple states away.
One of my objectives for the store before I moved to Rhode Island was to develop a social media following robust enough that I could bring attention to cartography made by people who have small followings themselves, allowing me to swoop in and sell more of their products for a cut as a distributor. This might be a small step towards that.
Facebook is nearly dead, Instagram is okay. I barely post anything to TikTok. I don’t know any other business for whom BlueSky is their primary social media account. A thing that makes me nervous is that my business is becoming closely intertwined with my personal brand. Being an outspoken progressive is a huge benefit on BlueSky but that’s not a representative sample of my customer base. I’m going to have to be careful about brand management and I might have to become a bit more bland/corporate for my business accounts as I separate my personal and professional identities.
January: New Logo
Speaking of identities: Amid all the success, I was eager to adopt a new logo that reflected a newfound faith in my business. Before I get paid, I’m going to help my friends get paid. Read all about it in the link.
February: Interns
Unrelated to the BlueSky post, I had the great privilege of hosting three interns from Brown University for the spring semester. Brown doesn’t have a business school per se but they do have PRIME which is a Master's in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship and it clearly attracts very talented students, three of whom were assigned to me for 10 hours of remote work a week each. Having gone to a humble state school, there was something vaguely intimidating about the spectacular resumes of the interns. Rather than try to keep them busy with work I felt I needed to get done, I figured it would be better to ask them what they wanted most on their portfolios at the end of the semester and to facilitate their effort so I could benefit from the things that they actually excelled at. After all, if I put them to work doing what I wanted, I would never get their input on what they thought I should do. To their credit, they didn’t want to do what they were good at, they all wanted to create some kind of an online marketing campaign despite having little in the way of experience in the subject. Internships are supposed to be about trying new things and gaining experience and I admired the eagerness of the interns to stretch out of their comfort zones. They brought me valuable insights in online marketing, did research for me on tax reporting software, created original multimedia content and forced me to rethink my management strategy.
In my own career, I’ve had very few supervisory roles and the thought occurred to me that if my professional experience didn’t afford me the responsibilities of management and hiring experience, here I was imperfectly doing it myself. I don’t know how productive it was but in true internship fashion, I suspect I learned more than the interns. I hope Brown University will let me borrow more of their talent in the future. Similarly, I’d love to commission some RISD talent for new shelves or displays. There’s a huge amount of local talent that I think I could tap for mutual benefit.
March: Commendation
The state legislature of Rhode Island, cosponsored by state representatives David Morales and Jennifer Stewart (in the photo with me below), voted to issue to me a citation “In recognition of your outstanding work making the Map Center the hub for geographic literacy and curiosity in the state of Rhode Island.” It doesn’t help me pay my bills but it’s a pretty surreal experience for my work to be recognized this way.
Andrew Middleton and Jennifer Stewart smiling and holding the signed citation from the Rhode Island legislature.
May: New Hires
I’ve become truly, truly insufferable in the past few months because most sentences are preambled with “As a job creator….” I’ve finally been able to hire two fantastic additions to the team, the first employees the Map Center has had in over ten years. Tim and Caroline, whose photos and last names I will omit because they have day jobs that they don’t want to entangle with a certain politically piquant map store, come in on Saturdays and the new five day weeks are a huge quality of life improvement for me. I also like having the input from people who are passionate and invested in my mission. They’ve helped me with an experimental event and I’m looking forward to using my new workforce to put on events and social engagements. They make me feel less alone and like my ideas and my vision matter.
Hiring new employees is when things get complicated from a business management perspective. I’m still learning how to scale and I think I’m at that point where growth requires that I pass through an expensive period of adaptation to the added paperwork. But it’s nice that my use of the first person plural when referring to my business is finally appropriate.
A thing I still worry about is that I, Andrew Middleton, am the Map Center’s chief product. My story, my knowledge, my stage presence and my curation are the reason people come to the store. I’m training my new team to be fully self sufficient on weekends and I hope that this doesn’t alienate any customers for whom meeting the owner is half the fun of coming at all. They’re going to have to get good in their own ways. Fortunately, I think they’re up to the challenge.
June: State of the Map US
I gave a talk at the annual conference for Open Street Map, this time held in Boston. How could I say no? I gave a presentation on the store and tried to have something meaningful to say as an update to last year’s talk.
July: Maps on Vinyl
Book cover of Maps on Vinyl by Damien Saunder
One of my guiding principles for The Map Center has been promoting living talent, not just speculating on the work done by others who have died long before me. Through the serendipity of a LinkedIn post, I discovered Damien Saunder as he faced a conundrum: how was he, an Australian, supposed to get his magnificent new self-published book into a bookstore and independent seller in the United States? I cold messaged him, introduced myself and then we were off. He shipped several pallets of boxes and I became the exclusive distributor of Maps on Vinyl in North America. So far I’m about 20% through my stock which means I have a long way to go, but I’ve been enjoying this new line of business. Cold-calling bookstores trying to get them to buy books they’ve never heard of by authors they’ve never heard of from map stores they’ve never heard of is a bit of a lift, to put it lightly. I hope that in the future the wholesale deals will come easier when more wary bookstores will be more familiar with who I am and what I’m about.
Maps on Vinyl by Damien Saunder opened up to the page On the Road
On that same subject, a fun byproduct of my extremely niche brand of celebrity is that at events like the ESRIUC in San Diego, people know who I am. Granted, that’s not because I’m particularly good at being a GIS analyst or cartographer but because I made an extremely silly business decision in moving across the country to take over an unprofitable business selling obsolete products. Nonetheless, being able to schmooze with people who wouldn’t have given me the time of day a couple of years ago is one way that the Map Center doesn’t pay me much of anything in money but finds ways of reimbursing the massive sunk cost.
Damien himself is the former cartography lead at Apple Maps and he’s worked at National Geographic. He’s kind of a big deal and this strange project of mine is putting me in the close proximity of the upper echelon in a way that grinding away on ArcGISPro projects never has. Kenneth Field, Dr. Dawn Wright, Dr. Sylvia Earle, Rebecca Solnit and many more fascinating local experts at National Geographic, the Washington Post, The Woodwell Institute, The Leventhal Center, and the David Rumsey Center are people I now get to call my colleagues. One reason I justified taking on The Map Center in the first place is because I anticipated something like this might happen. Even if the business fails, I’ll have earned enough social capital that perhaps the endeavor will pay off without it. Even if the ship goes down, I’ll be wearing an reputational lifejacket.
Just a cheeky photo of Andrew with Dr. Dawn Wright at ESRIUC holding up each others’ stickers. Her sticker commemorates being the first woman of color to descend to the deepest part of the ocean. Mine is a cute lil’ record.
Prospectus
Things are vastly less dire than they were a year ago. The business has seen sales per month that are roughly three to four times what they were in the same month the previous year. Visitorship is much higher, online orders are up and brand recognition phenomenal. I think there’s a reasonable probability that, with increased sales around Christmas, I might actually hit $100,000 in gross sales this year. For a small business barely two years in, that’s fantastic. To have done all that with a full time job is unreal. Now, with markup, staff and overhead, that is still a pittance to live on (about $25k) but it does speak to growth and interest in what I’m offering my customers. More people know about the business and are on board with what I’m doing. My website hits are largely coming from search engines and direct visits which means that my growing viewership is not just being generated by links from other more successful websites. More people know about my business and are visiting the website directly. I have an audience of my own. This is important as I hunt around for a larger space with room for classes and more inventory as I’m going to have to either convince a new landlord or a bank that this business is now much more than an act of public performance art but a real, growing business.
There are many different Map Centers that exist as future possibilities. One of them is an enormous cartographic Bass Pro Shops that is a retail attraction. One is a more modest upscale boutique affair housed in a building that I purchase as a real estate investment. One of them is a franchise and multiple locations across the country. None of these are ripe enough for discussion at length here but they exist and occupy a substantial amount of my mental energy. I’ve become obsessed with commercial real estate. Whether I lease or own, the next chapter is going to be bigger with more room for events, activities and classes.
Less substantially, I’m becoming a Rhode Island character. I’m tired, of course, but I’m slowly starting to do normal human being things on the weekend again and meeting my neighbors at mixers and socials. I’ve made the growth of the physical store location a tentpole of my business strategy because I think the inherent physicality of my product is just more fun to experience in real life. This has the downside of tying me to the store during regular hours and it has been something of an anchor around my neck. As I start doing more conferences and paid speaking events I have been able to turn this anchor into an opportunity to travel or at least get out of town. I’ll be speaking at the North American Cartographic Information Society conference in Louisville KY so if I can’t go on vacation at least I’ll be able to leave Rhode Island. I’m trying to backburner my mental health less by slowing down a little, socializing more and trying to find some joy in ways that I haven’t prioritized yet.
There is still a specter of tariffs, economic recession, consolidation of the commercial real estate market, rising rents, gutting of RIPTA bus service, a housing market upset by cratering higher education in the state, reduced tourism and the general poor state of Rhode Island’s business environment. There is so much that I can’t control. There are moments when it feels so fantastically unfair that my successes should happen at this moment in history when everything could come crashing down with an executive order. Nowhere I could go is fully safe right now but the thought of abandoning hope before I absolutely have to isn’t an option on the table anymore. Every bulk inventory purchase I make, it becomes a little bit harder to give up. I dig a little deeper in. Last year, such investment made me really nervous. I wanted to protect my retreat and I avoided writing big checks on stock or materials that I had to commit myself to making pay off. Now I think that charging ahead and planning on success before it is guaranteed is just a necessary part of the journey and I’m starting to better appreciate some of the more lunatic LinkedIn personalities that advocate psychotic optimism. I’m not nearly too big to fail but I am too big to give up on yet and, more than survival, I’m now dreaming about what a bigger, better Map Center could look like.