How this is made
The Merchants Almanac is a dated record of the businesses of Naperville, Illinois. It holds 13,713 of them. It is not a directory that tells you what is here today — plenty of those exist, and they are good. It keeps what was here, and when it changed.
Where the figures come from
Public sources, read directly. The businesses’ own websites, which publish their hours, their services, their prices and often their staff. County and city records for the buildings: parcels, assessments, permits, licences. Census figures for the neighbourhoods. Local press. Nothing here is bought from a data vendor, and nothing is estimated to fill a gap.
Every figure carries its date
A fact without a date is a rumour. Each figure on a business page says the day it was observed and, where it exists, links the page it came from. When a later reading disagrees with an earlier one, both stay: the page shows what is true now and what it used to be, with the span the old value held. 97 businesses on the record have at least one such change so far. A change of opening hours is reported only once the new hours have held for a fortnight, because a shop closed for a holiday edits its hours and edits them back, and that is not a shop that changed its hours.
What we do not do
- We do not fill silence. If we have not observed something, the page says nothing about it. An absence here means we have not looked or have not found — never that the business lacks the thing.
- We do not score businesses against each other, or sell placement, or take money to change a page.
- We do not republish other people’s writing. Review text stays with whoever wrote it.
- We do not publish a page that has nothing to say. Of 13,713 records, 3,897 currently hold enough to be worth a stranger’s time; the rest are kept and published as they thicken.
How it is read
A crawler reads the city on a weekly schedule, one request at a time, identifying itself and obeying each site’s robots file. It does not re-fetch what has not changed. If you would rather it did not read yours, say so and it will stop.
Mistakes
There will be some. The Almanac would rather be quiet than wrong, and when it is wrong it would rather be corrected in public and dated than edited in silence. Tell us.