Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intent of how the locator is supposed to work, but I'm thinking that for instances where the user has not allowed geocoding you would not show locations in the results in the store locator panel until someone has searched for a location in the search box. Just show the map with the markers. If you selected a marker, it would then add the highlighted result to the locator panel and could them populate the next closest stores until you reached the number you've configured to show.
It seems really odd to me to have 4 stores (or whatever number you choose in the settings) show up when the map is zoomed out to cover the entire US. It seems at that point, you'd want the user to search for the location near them and then show the top proximity results based on that query, or drill down using the map as explained above.
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