starbucks density watch
On his weblog, Jason Kottke picked up on the idea of finding addresses with maximum “Starbucks Density” and hundreds of commenters report on the number of stores in their neighborhood. [kottke] It’s fun to see people trying to establish café credibility and sort of upsetting to find that Seattle’s not especially competitive in the stores in a five-mile-radius category (e.g. 87 stores in my area vs. 169 in downtown Manhattan).
However, we are still blessed in the stores per caffeinated person department with one for every 13,340 people [columbia news service]. Breathe a sigh of relief folks, we’re not completely washed-up in the coffee universe.
Calculate your MSD using the Starbucks Retail Store Locator Device [starbucks]
I did this inadvertently the other day, when I was looking up information for the “Capitol Hill” Starbucks. Using my address I get the same number as you — 87. Personally, I’d be much more interested in knowing how many non-chain purveyors of coffee there are in that same area.
In the course of my cafe-related research, I came across http://www.addyourown.com, a nifty little wiki-like website that allows you to read and write reviews of coffee shops, restaurants, etc., by neighborhood. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be getting much traffic, but it’s a really nifty idea. Go to the main Seattle coffee shop page to look for (and add to) listings for your neighborhood.
Hmmm… I wonder how many *$ we’d have in a five-mile _radius_ if it wasn’t for Puget Sound and Lake Washington taking up more than half that circle? Or if you compare our five-mile radius to say, landlocked Denver’s?
I’d guess that there are at least 3 independent shops to every 1 Starbucks, but doing the counting is way more effort than I’m prepared to do.
Visit http://www.delocator.net, a web-site dedicated to preserving the underdog, and saving the indie cafes from Starbucks’ corporate sprawl. Here you can enter your zip-code, and you will not only see your non-corporate to Starbucks cafe ratio, but also the address and comments of fellow cafe patrons. I’m in Chicago with a 95:124 non-corp. to Starbucks ratio. For everyone else in Seattle, those in the 98104 zip will find a 81:126 ratio.
Keep up the good fight by adding unlisted indie cafes. Thanks for all of the coffee enlightenment!
delocator: thanks for mentioning delocator on this post — Cat wrote about it a few months later [mb], still it’s nice for the two links to finally find their way to the same archived page.