Inspired by this now-classic map of McDonald’s clusters in the U.S., blogger and scientists James Davenport decided to map out as many of the Starbucks locations as he could find and discovered that 80% of the country’s population lives within a 20-mile drive of a cup of Starbucks.

“Starbucks has been used in the past to gauge economic health, and I’ve found it used as a standard metric in geography classes,” writes Davenport, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington’s astronomy department, on his blog ifweassume.com. “The closer you live to a Starbucks the higher your rent is likely to be, and in NYC the density of locations can reach as high as 150 with a radius of 5 miles!”

And so the map seen above shows all the company-owned Starbucks in the U.S. linked using a Delaunay triangulation. According to that map, the longest distance from one of these stores appears to be about 140 miles.

However, while the map does account for around 85% of Starbucks locations, it doesn’t include those franchised ‘bucks like the ones you see in airports and inside of grocery stores. So it’s possible that the longest trip to a Starbucks could be even shorter.

Using census data, Davenport then figured out how close most of us are likely to live to a Starbucks. According to his findings, more than 30% of Americans live within a single mile of a Starbucks, while more than 60% are within 10 miles of one. And by the time you get out to 20 miles, that covers a whopping 80% of the country’s population, approximately 250,000,000 people.

The United States of Starbucks [IfWeAssume.com via SeattlePI.com]

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