How we built the Access Index

Shops: we counted walk-in premises where sex toys are sold on site and that we could confirm open as of 1 October 2026, including counters inside other shops. That gave 154 locations, and 116 of them are counters inside other shops. We publish the town each one is in, never the business name.

People: Stats NZ 2023 Census counts for about 32,000 small areas, placed at the centre of each area.

Places: every town, suburb and locality in the LINZ NZ Gazetteer.

Drive times: road routes from OpenStreetMap, calculated with the OSRM routing engine. They assume clear roads, with no traffic, parking or ferry waiting time.

We then worked out the share of people more than 30 and 60 minutes from the nearest shop, and the median drive for every town and region.

The shop list is the weakest part. Some shops may be missing, and some we counted may have changed. Tell us what we missed and we'll check it.

Some locations are counters inside other shops. We confirmed them online but didn't visit them.

The headline counts places we couldn't fully confirm, so it holds either way. Town pages give the drive to the nearest shop we could confirm, and also the closer figure where an unconfirmed place changes it, most of all around Queenstown.

Drive times are clear-road estimates, so real trips, especially in cities, can take longer.

Google Trends figures are relative interest from a sample, not search volumes.