The folks at Flowing Data have done it again. Not content to simply bring you all the American burger chain map data you ever wanted, nor where your closest pizza chains are at, FD has now taken its chain-mapping prowess to Big Coffee.
If you thought Starbucks was basically everywhere, you’re kind of right. Still, even they have their particular area of dominance. Since the main map above showing all the chains at once can be a lot to take in, FD also broke the map down individually by chain.
Here are the eight biggest chains, and their areas of concentration.
Starbucks might be everywhere, but the heaviest concentrations are firmly on the West Coast.
As you can see, DD has some pretty fierce East Coast dominance. Looking at the maps for both Dunkin’ and Starbucks, you can see they both battle it out on nearly equal ground in Chicago.
The data on Starbucks Jr. locations is interesting mainly because their areas of greatest concentration don’t overlap with Starbucks. Still, there are quite a few in the Dunkin’ Donuts-dominant area. If you didn’t know that Starbucks owns Seattle’s Best, you might even think it was a completely separate option.
If this map covered North America rather than just the U.S., we’d all see that Timmy Ho’s basically owns Canada. But this beloved Canadian institution has been steadily making inroads in the northern part of the U.S., where both weather patterns and coffee tastes are evidently closer to that of our neighbors to the North.
Meanwhile, Caribou is content to chill out in Minneapolis, with minor appearances in a few other places.
Dutch Bros. is Starbucks’ main chain competition on the West Coast—and not really anywhere else.
Meanwhile, California is a different place, with different tastes. Peet’s Coffee and Tea is everywhere.
SoCal is the only place where The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf makes a strong showing, although we do have to note that the very first place we tried it was at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Does striking at Starbucks’ home base count as a case of shots fired?
[via Flowing Data, Vox]