The people walking into an Equinox gym come from neighborhoods where the median household earns $155,400 a year. The people walking into a YMCA come from neighborhoods where the median household earns $59,800. Both buildings hold treadmills, weight racks, and a pool. One audience out-earns the other by a factor of 2.6.
That single comparison comes from a dataset we have spent the past several months assembling: verified foot-traffic and audience profiles for 419 American chains — gyms, grocers, salad bars, smoothie shops, fast food joints, dollar stores — covering billions of store visits. For each chain, the data describes the neighborhoods its actual visitors travel from: their median household income, their education levels, how long they stay per visit.
When you look across all 419 chains at once, the dataset stops being a market-research curiosity and becomes something closer to an X-ray of American class structure. Money doesn’t just buy a nicer car. It sorts who stands in which checkout line, and the sorting follows one rule with almost no exceptions: the healthier the business, the richer its customers.
What a $100,000 Salad Actually Is
To be clear about the title: nobody is paying $100,000 for lettuce. A Sweetgreen bowl runs about $13. The $100,000 is what it takes to be the person holding it.
Here is the mechanism. Our data measures who actually shows up at each chain’s doors, then describes the census profile of the neighborhoods those visitors live in. For Sweetgreen, that profile is a household at $107,800 — within rounding distance of the Whole Foods audience ($111,100). The same measurement at McDonald’s returns $70,800. Nothing about a salad requires wealth. But the salad chains put their stores in wealthy ZIP codes, price lunch at $13-16, and market to the people already there — so the audience that emerges from millions of measured visits is, functionally, the top third of American earners. The “$100,000 salad” is shorthand for that filter: a food that is technically available to everyone and, in practice, eaten by households clearing six figures.
When I saw the Equinox numbers next to the YMCA, it honestly wasn’t that surprising, and a lot of this isn’t, but it’s really interesting to dig into. What I think actually matters is the amount of TIME people spend there. If you’re spending twenty minutes more at the gym over ten, fifteen, twenty years, that becomes an enormous difference in how much healthy activity you’re getting. That’s really what it comes down to.
The Wellness Ladder, in Dollars
Group the 419 chains by what they sell, sort by the median household income of their visitors, and the gradient is unmistakable.
What we learned: every healthy category of business — premium grocery, boutique fitness, salad chains, juice bars — draws its customers from above the national median income, and every unhealthy category draws from below it. The national median ($80,610) sits almost exactly on the dividing line between the two.
Who shops where: the income ladder
Median household income of each category’s measured visitors · Nov 2025 – Apr 2026
Every healthy-leaning category sits above the national median line. Every category at the bottom of the nutrition spectrum sits below it. The audience for fresh produce, cold-pressed juice, and group fitness is not America. It is roughly the top third of America.
At the extremes, the gap turns almost cartoonish. The grocery chain with the wealthiest audience in the dataset, Andronico’s Community Markets in the Bay Area, draws from neighborhoods with a median income of $154,000. The poorest, Dave’s Market, draws from neighborhoods at $43,200.
Sweetgreen to Burger King Is a $40,000 Walk
Fast food and fast-casual look interchangeable from the sidewalk: counter service, combo menu, fifteen minutes. The audience data says they serve different countries.
What we learned: the customers at salad counters and the customers at burger windows are separated by roughly $40,000 in household income — and the drop is not gradual. Between CAVA and McDonald’s, the data falls off a $22,700 cliff with nothing in between.
The fast-casual cliff
Median visitor household income, salad counters vs. burger windows
Walking from the salad line to the burger line means descending roughly $40,000 in household income. And the two lines are nowhere near the same length. Over a year of measured traffic, Sweetgreen’s 124 tracked locations draw about 9.2 million visits. McDonald’s 12,986 draw about 6.8 billion.
The Real Cost of Eating Healthier
That $40,000 is the gap in household income between the neighborhoods around a Sweetgreen and those around a Burger King. But the meals themselves are nowhere near that far apart. Using national in-store averages, a Burger King combo runs about $12; a Sweetgreen bowl with a drink lands around $17. That’s a difference of roughly $5 a meal.
Say you eat lunch out at one of them twice a week, a fair real-world cadence. That’s about 104 lunches a year: roughly $1,248 at Burger King versus $1,768 at Sweetgreen, a difference of about $520 a year. That’s real money, especially on a tighter budget. But set $520 next to a $40,000 income gap and the whole thing reframes, the healthier lunch isn’t a $40,000 wall. It’s about $10 a week.
And these places can sit right next to each other, there are so many Sweetgreens a few doors down from a Burger King in urban areas. That proximity is the tell: when the price gap is five dollars and not forty thousand, the thing holding the two lines apart isn’t the menu. It’s everything around the menu, whether there’s a Sweetgreen near you at all, whether your lunch break is long enough to wait for a bowl, whether anything in your day has made the healthy option the easy one. The barrier is time, access, and environment far more than affordability.
Even the Gym Has a Class System
Fitness is supposed to be the democratic corner of wellness — a pair of shoes and some floor space.
What we learned: gym brands have stratified into income tiers as rigid as airline cabins, and the top tier’s audience out-earns the bottom tier’s by nearly $100,000 a year.
The institution at the bottom of that grid deserves its own paragraph. The YMCA’s visitors come from neighborhoods with a median income of $59,800, and just 18.3% hold college degrees — the lowest education share of any fitness brand we track, lower than several discount grocers. Yet YMCA visitors stay an average of 75 minutes per visit, right alongside Crunch (78) and LA Fitness (79), and its 750 branches log roughly 340 million visits a year. By the numbers, the Y is the only institution in the dataset delivering long, committed wellness visits to low-income America at national scale. It is also a 180-year-old nonprofit, which suggests something about how much the market was ever going to solve this on its own.
Rich People Linger. Poor People Are Processed.
The dataset records one more thing about every visit: how long it lasts.
What we learned: the richer a brand’s audience, the longer its customers stay. The wealthiest-audience brands host visits of 75 to 92 minutes; the poorest-audience brands turn their customers around in under 14. Line the chains up by dwell time and the income ladder reappears, disguised as a clock.
How long America stays, by brand
Average minutes per visit · green = wealthiest audiences, red = poorest
Some of that is just what the buildings are for — nobody does a 90-minute session at a gas station. But the pattern survives the obvious objections: a Life Time visit lasts eleven times longer than a Casey’s stop, and the brands where Americans spend their longest stretches of discretionary time are, almost without exception, the brands with the richest audiences. At the top of the income scale, commercial space is somewhere you spend an afternoon. At the bottom, it is engineered throughput — get in, transact, get out. Leisure time inside a business is itself a luxury good, and the dwell clock prices it.
For what it’s worth, “rich people linger, poor people are processed” is an observation, not an indictment. When you have more time to focus on the things that make you healthier, it has a big impact. And if you don’t have the time, if you’re working multiple jobs, it’s much harder to focus on it. Let’s be honest, you don’t always want to when you’re exhausted or squeezed for time.
What the Cheap End of Healthy Actually Looks Like
If there is a hopeful read in the data, it is that the wellness divide narrows in a few specific places, and they are findable.
What we learned: the brands doing the real volume of healthy visits in America are the cheap, unglamorous ones — not the status names. Sprouts Farmers Market sells produce to an audience at $96,600, a full $14,500 below Whole Foods, with 474 stores and 170 million visits a year. WinCo Foods puts a full grocery store in front of an audience earning $77,700 — below the national median. And Planet Fitness, at the price of two salads a month, moved more bodies than every luxury gym in America combined:
None of those brands carry status. All of them move the actual public-health needle more than the brands that do. The alternative — the world the bottom half of the income table actually inhabits — is the one our neighborhood data keeps surfacing: a Dollar General (19,795 locations, 2.6 billion visits a year, $62,000 audience income) where the produce section would be, and a drive-thru where the third place used to be. The $100,000 salad isn’t a menu item. It’s an address. The question our ZIP-by-ZIP Neighborhood Wellness Score keeps asking is the same one this data asks at chain scale: how healthy can a person be in a place where the healthy option was priced out before they were born?
I wanted to build this dataset just to understand what the differences really are, and to dig into not only the impact but the why. There are millions of data points in here, and they all tell a story. And the story isn’t that lower-income America keeps making bad choices, it’s that the healthy choice keeps getting placed further out of reach, by ZIP code, by where the stores get built, by the hours left in a day after two jobs. Naming that isn’t despair, it’s the opposite. The cheap, unglamorous options are out there, a Planet Fitness, a Sprouts, a WinCo, and once you can see the pattern that’s quietly been sorting everyone, you can start to find them and push back on it. That’s the whole reason we keep mapping this.
About This Data
Audience and visit figures come from our proprietary location-intelligence dataset covering 419 U.S. chains and their physical locations, with visit measurement over the six-month window of November 1, 2025 – April 30, 2026 (Erewhon figures reflect a 12-month window, May 2025 – April 2026). “Median household income” and “college-educated share” describe the census characteristics of the home neighborhoods that each chain’s measured visitors travel from — not the personal finances of any individual customer. Visit counts are foot-traffic measurements, not sales; annual visit figures are estimated by doubling the measured six-month window. Bar lengths in the charts are proportional to each value within its chart. National median household income reference: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 ($80,610). Coverage varies by chain; figures describe the locations in our dataset.
Cory Jones has spent 20 years in media and publishing and now leads the data and editorial operation behind The Greenest. He built and maintains the site’s Neighborhood Wellness Score — a proprietary dataset scoring food access, walkability, air quality, healthcare access, and health outcomes across 18,356 U.S. ZIP codes, drawing on CDC PLACES data, EPA air quality readings, and verified location intelligence. He is a huge fan of Rancho Gordo beans and tries to work out more than he actually works out.
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