Like McDonald’s, Starbucks seems to be everywhere you go in the United States.
But just how deeply has Starbucks engrained itself into the U.S.? Are they really on every corner like they seem to be? Now we have a better idea thanks to James Davenport, a PhD candidate from the University of Washington.
He created a Voronoi diagram to find the farthest point from a Starbucks (including only franchise locations, not stores located in a grocery store, for example) in the United States. The farthest you can be from a Starbucks in the U.S. is 140 miles, or about the distance from Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia. To put it another way, nobody in the U.S. is more than 140 miles from a Pumpkin Spice Latte:
And he created this graph that show just how close we all are to a Starbucks.
That’s right, almost everyone in the U.S. lives within 100 miles of a Starbucks. But even more fascinating is how the proximity to Starbucks relates to urban U.S. population. From Davenport:
There are ~311 million people living in the USA, with 82% living in urbanized areas. One might define urbanization in the modern era as the distance to the nearest Starbucks. An “urban” environment would therefore be anyplace within a 20 mile radius. Yes, more than 80% of the USA (that’s 250,000,000 people) live within 20 miles of a Starbucks.
There you have it, like it or not, Starbucks is urban America.
[h/t Fast Company]
Images courtesy of James Davenport
Photo: Flickr/IntangibleArts
