Disapointing Corporate Attitude to Sharing GPS Data

I have a nephew who owns one and I have sent him a message asking if he knows if the company has the GPS coordinates for their stores. Will be interesting to see what he says.

Several years ago I asked AAA why they couldn't put GPS coordinates for anyone that advertised in their guide books. I told the man I spoke to at their corporate headquarters that with the availability of GPS receivers the coordinates could be furnished by the advertiser and would be no added work on AAA. Either he was mistaken or was blowing me off because he said when the next addition of each guide book came out they would contain the Coordinates. AS any AAA member knows, that didn't happen.

There are some surprisingly huge cos. who don't have android or iPhone apps......Starbucks I believe does have those apps. They probably figure why have a poi file when this info you're looking for is already available on your smartphone...

I used to be a bit bewildered at the almost complete unwillingness of companies to provide GPS coordinates for their locations, but I think I understand it better now. I can imagine several reasons:

1. They already have a "Store Locator" on their website, and in many cases they might see the dissemination of GPS coordinates as "taking traffic away from their website". The Marketing people all want as many pageviews as possible so they can show us the pretty pictures and make another sales pitch.
2. As @johnnatash4 suggests, the growing ubiquity of smartphones probably exacerbates the previous point. They may figure that there are way more smartphone owners that there are GPS owners, so they're not losing out on much if they don't cater to the "GPS geeks".
3. I believe that more and more companies are going "metrics crazy". They may be reluctant to put any effort into supplying their location information in bulk because they won't know how many people use it, or when, or where. They could very well prefer that we all hit their website/mobile_site/app so they can track the number of location searches and try to "mine" them for more of that valuable(?!) marketing information.
4. In many (most?) cases they don't even have GPS coordinates to share. They've outsourced their "Store Locator" (if not their entire website) to a third party. They provide a list of street addresses and the web provider either batch geocodes them or does it on the fly, depending on the type of search.

Good Analysis.

is a good example, at one point in time they provide gps coordinates in various formats, then they come up with an app and discontinued the gps coordinates.