Nathan Yau mapped “the nearest coffee shop, among popular chains, within a 10-mile radius”:
My expectation was that Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts would dominate, with 10,000-plus and 7,000-plus locations nationwide, respectively. This wasn’t far-fetched when you look at the map above. … Starbucks is all over, whereas Dunkin’ Donuts clearly dominates on the east coast. … The spatial concentration in cities didn’t surprise me so much, but the cumulative coverage of the coffee places did. … [T]here are lots of areas in the country where it is more than ten miles to the nearest chain.
Khoi Vinh, who considers coffee a “scourge,” wouldn’t mind being miles away from a chain:
In the West, and particularly in urban centers of the United States, we’ve turned coffee into not just a daily habit, but a totem of conspicuous consumption. They are “rituals of self-congratulation” (a choice phrase from Frank Bruni) wherein we continually obsess over certain coffee purveyors or certain methods of brewing coffee — each new one more complex, more Rube Goldbergian and more comically self-involved than the previous brewing fad.
Responding to Vinh’s aversion, Kottke draws an analogy:
Coffee, like almost everything else these days, is a sport. Everyone has a favorite team (or coffee making method or political affiliation or design style or TV drama or rapper or comic book), discusses techniques and relives great moments with other likeminded fans, and argues with fans of other teams. The proliferation and diversification of media over the past 35 years created thousands of new sports and billions of new teams. These people turned hard-to-find nail polish into a sport. These people support Apple in their battle against Microsoft and Samsung. This guy scouts fashion phenoms on city streets. Finding the best bowl of ramen in NYC is a sport. Design is a sport. Even hating sports is a sport; people compete for the funniest “what time is the sportsball match today? har har people who like sports are dumb jocks” joke on Twitter.
Let people have their sports, I say. Liking coffee can’t be any worse than liking the Yankees, can it?
The Dish 