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!”
There has never been a period in history where the future was not a mystery. This is a key feature of human existence, and yet, it feels especially uncertain now. In fact, while the tenor of my State of the Map Store from last year was dire, it was only a couple of weeks before a much needed breath of life was blown into The Map Center. I worry about the future a great deal and yet sometimes amazing good things are also unpredictable. 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.
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 into oblivion. 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 for me. 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.
It was the end of a long day, it was already pitch black and freezing outside and I wasn’t eager to brave the weather to get home. A woman looking for Jordan’s Jungle next door came in and, 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! When she left, I described the incident just as it had happened. People went nuts for it.
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 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.
It being nearly Christmas, I was subjected to a flurry 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 and desperately wished one were nearby. I became a minor online celebrity. A couple times a week someone comes into the store having found me on BlueSky.
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. 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 higher.
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
Amid all the success, I was eager to adopt a new logo that reflected a newfound faith in my business. 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. Having gone to a humble state school, there was something vaguely intimidating about the spectacular resumes of the interns that were assigned to me. Rather than try to keep them busy with work 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. To their credit, 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 how I think of myself as a manager. 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.
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.
Maps on Vinyl
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.
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 but because I made an extremely silly business decision in moving across the country to take over an unprofitable business with a low market cap. 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 investment. 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 their close proximity in a way that grinding away on ArcGISPro projects never has. 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 notoriety that perhaps the endeavor will pay off without making much money directly. I want The Map Center to succeed but I need to make sure that my own wellbeing and long term prospects come first.
New Hires
I’ve become truly, truly insufferable in the past few months because most sentences are preambled with “As a job creator….” Tim and Caroline have been fantastic additions to the team. I won’t use their last names because they have day jobs that they don’t want to entangle with their periodic Saturday shifts at a politically piquant map store. Free Saturdays are a huge quality of life improvement for me and I 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.
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. It’s also nice that my use of the first person plural when referring to my business is now 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.
Prospectus
Things are vastly less dire than they were a year ago. The business has seen sales per month that are roughly three times what they were in the same month the previous year. I think there’s a reasonable probability that with increased sales around Christmas I might actually hit $100,000 in gross sales. 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 and overhead that is still a pittance to live on 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. 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. None of them are ripe for discussion here but they exist and occupy a substantial amount of my mental energy. I’ve become obsessed with commercial real estate and 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 actively looking for a larger space. I’m tired, of course, but I’m slowly starting to do normal human being things on the weekend again. 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. As I start doing more conferences and paid speaking events I have been able to turn this anchor into a chance to travel or at least get out of town. 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 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. Nowhere I could go is 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, I make it just a little bit harder to give up. I dig a little deeper in. Last year, such investment made me really nervous. Now I think of it just as an inevitable part of the journey. 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.