Ashland, Kansas has 746 people in its trade zone. No Casey's General Store within a 16-minute drive. And a per-capita retail spend of $13,367, higher than the median trade zone around an existing Casey's.
That number is exactly the kind of thing that gets you excited before you've checked it properly.
Casey's told investors on June 24 that it's sitting on a mountain of whitespace: about 75% of the towns under 20,000 people inside its own distribution footprint still don't have a store, per COO Ena Williams. The company just beat a 350-store three-year plan with 504, is projecting at least 400 more, and walked in off a record year, net income up 31%. Wall Street bought the framing within days: there's demand out there and the map hasn't caught up.
So I went looking for the demand. First I pulled Casey's complete store network from the chain's own locator, 2,777 locations, queried point by point until no new store turned up. That matters: the public location datasets most analyses lean on carry only about two-thirds of Casey's stores, because their scrapers search outward from bigger cities and Casey's entire specialty is towns those searches miss. Rebuild a whitespace list on incomplete store data and you'll invent whitespace that a real store already fills.
Roughly 2,000 of those stores sit in six core Midwest states: Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska. I profiled 220 existing trade zones across that footprint, then found 40 towns that fit the company's own whitespace description, under 20,000 people, none of them metro suburbs, every one verified against the complete network to sit at least 12 miles from the nearest Casey's. Ashland was one of them.
If Ashland is representative, the story writes itself: the money's already there, Casey's just hasn't gotten around to it yet.
The baseline test that broke Wayfair's screen breaks this one too
Before I trusted Ashland, I did what this newsletter did two weeks ago with Wayfair's eight stores: I ran the same numbers against a group that had no business looking special. Forty small towns across the same six states, drawn without any regard to whether a Casey's is nearby. Just random.
If the whitespace towns were sitting on real, unscreened demand, their spend numbers should separate from a neutral sample. They don't. Spend barely moves anywhere: $11,343 around Casey's stores, $10,920 in whitespace, $10,966 at random. And spend propensity, the metric that's supposed to find demand, runs backward: 0.152 around stores, 0.169 in whitespace, 0.153 at random. If propensity screened for anything, the towns Casey's skipped would have been its first stops, not its leftovers.
Ashland isn't a hidden gem. It's just what a small town in this part of the country spends, whether or not a Casey's has found it yet.
The ratio can't find demand because the spend number is itself estimated mostly from income. Divide it by income and the two cancel; the sliver that survives runs against income, which is why the richest group posts the worst ratio. Math, not a market signal. The Wayfair screen died the same way, in wealthy suburbs instead of the rural Midwest.
So don't trust a spend-based affordability ratio until you've run it against a neutral, unselected sample. Tight inside your approved deals could mean the screen is working, or just be what income-derived spend ratios look like anywhere. Ashland proves the second reading.
The whitespace towns are the poorest group on the map, and it isn't a metro artifact
So the money argument is dead. What's left shows up the moment you put the three groups side by side. I expected the whitespace towns and the random towns to be interchangeable samples of small-town Midwest. That's not what came back. The three groups form a ladder, and the whitespace towns are the bottom rung of it.
Look at income first. Whitespace towns: $64,674. Random towns: $71,414. Casey's zones: $73,317. The towns matching Casey's whitespace description run about 9% poorer than towns drawn from the same footprint at random, and home value orders the same way. The whitespace list isn't a neutral slice of the region that happens to lack stores. It's the bottom of the region.
And the random control hugging Casey's own numbers isn't a coincidence. 21 of the 40 random towns already have a Casey's within five miles. That's what 2,000 stores in six states means on the ground: a random footprint town looks like a Casey's town because Casey's has already built in most of the towns that clear its bar. The towns still open are the ones that don't.
The obvious objection: my store sample includes metro-fringe zones, and metro money could be manufacturing the gap. So I reran everything on just the 124 store zones under 20,000 people, the same universe the whitespace list lives in.
The income gap survives, thinner. Small-town Casey's zones: $71,216 median household income. Whitespace towns: $64,674. Still 10% clear. Home value narrows to about 5% and grad-degree share collapses; strike both as metro artifacts.
One variable gets stronger under the control. Even inside the under-20,000 universe, the median Casey's trade zone holds 8,170 people. The median whitespace town holds 3,423. The towns Casey's actually built in hold nearly two and a half times the people of the towns it says it's missing.
Thresholds tell the same story: 162 of 220 Casey's zones clear $65,000 in median household income, against 19 of 40 whitespace towns, with the random control clearing at nearly the store rate.
If a chain's growth story leans on a whitespace count, ask what "whitespace" is actually measuring before you build a forecast around it. Casey's isn't wrong that 75% of those towns lack a store. The leap from "lacks a store" to "qualifies for one" is the part the raw count skips.
I rebuilt the 75% claim from scratch. It checks out, and it's 890 towns
Everything above tests whether the whitespace is worth building. The prior question: is the 75% number even true? Nobody outside Casey's real estate team had checked, so I did.
For the town side I took every incorporated Census place with between 100 and 20,000 people, across all nineteen states Casey's operates in, within 500 miles of one of its three distribution centers, the same "distribution footprint" Williams scoped her number to. That's 9,502 towns, each measured against the complete 2,777-store network.
7,081 of those towns, 74.5%, have no Casey's within five miles. Williams said about 75%. Rebuilt from the outside, on public data, her number comes in within half a point. The serve radius is the one judgment call, so I moved it: 80% unserved at 3 miles, 51% at 10. Five miles is a reasonable definition of "has a Casey's," and it's the one their number matches.
Here's the part the soundbite skips. Apply the floors this piece just found to all 7,081 towns, using town-level Census numbers so the bar is the median of the towns Casey's already serves: population at or above 1,919 and household income at or above $63,235. 890 towns clear both. A median bar is strict by construction, so I also ran the 25th percentile of Casey's own towns: 2,161 make that cut.
So the honest version of the whitespace claim runs: 75% of small towns in the footprint lack a store, and somewhere between 900 and 2,200 of them look like towns Casey's actually builds in. Still deep: the strict floor covers the plan's roughly 200 new-build sites four times over. But it's an order of magnitude smaller than 7,081, and the gap between those two numbers is the difference between a real estate strategy and an investor-deck flourish.
So what is Casey's actually missing?
Flat spend, two and a half times the population, an income gap that survives the metro control: a demographic pattern, not a proven cause. So I checked the most obvious alternative. Maybe someone else already built the gas station.
I pulled the nearest businesses around all 40 whitespace towns and a sample of ten built Casey's zones. None of the ten built towns have a competing fuel brand parked nearby. 18 of the 40 whitespace towns do: a Huck's in McLeansboro, a Kwik Shop in Ellsworth, Sinclairs, BPs, Phillips 66s, MFA Oil, and a scattering of others. For those eighteen, the floor isn't the story. A rival already sits on the obvious corner.
The other 22 don't. Ashland is one of them: no incumbent fuel brand nearby, just a Health Mart and a Do It Best. No spend advantage, and 746 people in the whole trade zone against the 8,170 a median small-town Casey's draws from. For that half of the list, the population and income floors are still the best explanation I've got.
Two caveats. A fuel-pad broker screens things no census number sees, parcels, traffic counts, interchange access, and I can't rule those out. And the nearest-businesses lookup only surfaces the closest 20 or so, so "no competitor found" means none turned up close by.
Some of that 75% will get built. Casey's fiscal 2027-29 (FY27-29) plan calls for at least 400 more stores, split roughly evenly between new construction and small acquisitions. But the 7,081-town count splits three ways: towns with a rival already on the corner, towns that wouldn't clear Casey's own revealed floor even if the map showed empty space, and the 890 to 2,161 that actually look like Casey's towns.
And the acquisition half of the plan is crowded. Sunoco has bought 140 stores since January, Cumberland Farms closed on Coen Markets' 54 sites on June 1, and convenience-store dealmaking broadly rebounded in 2026. The buyer pool for small regional operators is visibly deeper than a year ago, and that's the pool Casey's is counting on for half its 400.
Discount any whitespace count in an investor deck to the subset of towns that clear the chain's own revealed floors, and read the acquisition half of a store-growth target as competing in an M&A market, not as new pads. The towns that get Casey's roughly 200 ground-up builds will look like the Casey's bars in the chart above, not the whitespace bars.
If you're a QSR or small-format tenant pricing Casey's-adjacent pads (Casey's is the fifth-largest pizza chain in the country, so pizza operators most of all), size the real new-construction pipeline at half the headline and screen the town first. The $71,216 and 8,170 floors are Midwest convenience-store numbers, but the method travels: build the floor from a chain's built stores, then test its whitespace claim against a neutral sample of towns nobody picked.
One scope note: everything here sits in the six legacy Midwest states. The $1.145 billion acquisition of Fikes Wholesale, parent of the CEFCO banner, put Casey's into Texas, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi for the first time. Nothing in this study covers those markets.
Two ways to test this floor
- Casey's next site announcements. The FY27-29 plan names a number, not a list. Check each new batch against the population and income floors above; if the chain starts building meaningfully below them, the floor was softer than this data suggests. The 40 whitespace towns in the CSV are the standing version of the same test: does the company's own stated whitespace convert, or does it keep sitting open?
- Whether the Gulf South screens the same way. CEFCO came with its own site history. Once there's enough of a sample, the same profile on the Texas and Florida stores will show whether "Casey's floor" is a company-wide standard or a Midwest habit.
Economic Pulse
Redbook accelerated to +11.5% and fuel is finally falling: on the surface, a great fortnight for a rural gas-and-pizza chain. Then read the Fed minutes again. The spending is increasingly financed by credit at the bottom of the income distribution, and the customers "facing disproportionate pressures from elevated gasoline and grocery prices" are, almost verbatim, the median resident of the 300 trade zones above. Underwrite the income tier of a trade zone, not the national sales headline.
The fortnight's closures
I exported all 300 trade zones behind this piece with every variable above. Check my math, run your own floors, or watch which of the 40 whitespace towns gets a store first. It's all here.
-Andrew
Founding Team Member, GrowthFactor