When chains of stores, supermarkets, banks or anything else disappear from the streets – either due to bankruptcy, or because they are taken over, or rebranded – quite a few of the points of interest (POI) representing them on Google Maps will also disappear. But not all of them. In most cases at least a few of the POIs will remain as virtual representation on Maps, sometimes even years after the actual physical location has vanished from the shopping street. This is especially true for locations that are not part of e.g. a rebranding operation, but where the business is simply discontinued.
The specific example I want to use to showcase this phenomenon is a chain of banks in Belgium called Nagelmackers. As you can see in the screenshot of the Wikipedia page about the bank, there was a rebranding in 2015 when Delta Lloyd Bank in Belgium became Nagelmackers.
What did I find on the map?
So, I explored the map in several areas in Belgium and simply searched for Delta Lloyd Bank in each of the areas. One of them showed the a POI named Delta Lloyd Bank in Ekeren (near Antwerp), as you can see in the screen capture below.
When taking a more detailed look at the POI pictures, I noticed that the main image was quite old – dating back to early 2015. According to the information on Wikipedia, the rebranding had happened in the fall of 2015, so it became quite clear that this was very likely a chain leftover.
What did I do?
The first thing I decided to do then, especially if the POI main image is so old, is check the Street View images, as those are bound to be more recent. And fortunately that was indeed the case. Pretty quickly, I noticed the shop you see in the picture below. Take a close look at the specific way in which the windows are divided into parts at the top, or the way that part of the wall above the windows is at a more or less 45° angle, and compare that to the 2015 image of the bank.
Seems to be the same building, right? As there was no POI showing up on the map that represented this shop, I decided to just type in the name on display on the storefront, Gouden Schaar, combines with the city name, Ekeren, as search term. And bingo, there you had it! As you see in the next screenshot, the POI was already on the map, but had not been shown to me by default. And if you compare the map extract in the 2 screenshots, you will notice that the 2 POIs are located at roughly the same place.
Checking out the Gouden Schaar POI in more detail revealed even a further indication that this was a more recent addition: the main image was dated late 2018, three and a half years after the date on the Delta Lloyd image.
With this overwhelming amount of evidence, I was of course quite confident to submit a Permanently closed for the Delta Lloyd Bank POI.
What was the result?
The result was quite straightforward: after just a few minutes, the edit was approved and the POI was
was marked as Permanently closed. Mission accomplished.
This post is part of the Local Guides Clean The Map project (#LGCTM). All details and links to loads of other posts can be found here.
And here’s an overview of the case studies published so far: