How Far Can You Get From McDonald's? | Hacker News Reader

How Far Can You Get From McDonald's?

datapointed.net

194 pointsmikeocool112 comments

Back when Starbucks first exploded to such ludicrous levels that you'd sometimes find two of them sharing a single parking lot, the expectation became that there would always be a Starbucks nearby.

So much so that when I tried to drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles early one morning, I was surprised, then baffled, then amazed, then outraged that there was no Starbucks at all on I-10. I spent nearly 4 hours driving with no mocha in me at all, and was likely a hazard to other drivers.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that somebody had driven off the road on that stretch and sued Starbucks for negligence in not providing the requisite number of restaurants per square meter that its customer base had come to expect.

Fortunately, they've now put one in Blythe, so the drive is much less perilous.

Starbucks' expansion was interestingly "clumpy". Not surprising, I guess, when you realize they have to deal with the same supply chain issues as anyone else in a similar space. They didn't open a freestanding store in Tulsa until 2002, years after seemingly every other corner in Manhattan had one.

Starbucks also has a very sophisticated siting operation which predicts demand similar to how an oil company predicts oil. For green fields, you measure proxies, look at formula based on historical data, and guess. If you sink one well and hit a gusher, though, your expectation of profitable exploitability in the vicinity goes WAY up, so you start going nuts.

You'd think that two Starbucks across the street would cannibalize each other, but you'd be betting against very smart people who have made this their lifes' work and been richly rewarded for succeeding at it.

Source: anecdata from my father, who works in commercial real estate and thinks they (and Walgreens) are the two savviest businesses he's ever worked with in his industry.

P.S. A software solution to turn any arbitrary firm into Starbucks would be worth tens of millions of dollars if you sold it correctly. Billions if you went the next step and started flipping properties based on the software. (e.g. "101 Main St. on foreclosure auction for 200k, predicted value to a banking customer is 1.2 million, expected cost to work deal is 200k. Placing bid now.")

As I understand their placement of stores, the "cannibalization of customers" is how they determine if they have sufficiently saturated a metropolitan area. Basically, they keep building stores in a city until adding one more doesn't increase their overall business. The basic idea is that if they haven't saturated an area, then there's room for competitors to put in stores. I wish I could remember which publication I read this in.

P.S. A software solution to turn any arbitrary firm into Starbucks would be worth tens of millions of dollars if you sold it correctly.

Whoa, that is seriously interesting. Would you mind emailing me more details about your idea? :)

You'd think that two Starbucks across the street would cannibalize each other

Speaking of that, would they operate as two competing entities? Or would they help each other out? Ie lend each other supplies, direct overflow customers across the street, refrain from price wars, things like that.

Freestanding Starbucks stores aren't franchises, so they have every incentive to coordinate for maximum benefit. I'd be surprised if SBUX management had set up any incentives for it to work any other way.

Interesting.

Even if they were franchises, there might still be some game-theory advantage to cooperating. After all, a happy customer at one Starbucks is going to be positive toward all Starbuckses.

For whatever it's worth: Jim Collins coverage of Walgreens in _Good to Great_ focuses on how Walgreens pioneered this siting concept.

Starbucks knew that local competition helped them.

This post is from 2009, he updated it in 2010: http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon...

He also visited the spot http://www.datapointed.net/2010/10/the-farthest-place-from-m... which makes for a pretty entertaining tale.

Also, previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840542

What's interesting is to "View Image" on each in two separate tabs and flip between them. Notably there was one closure in the west that left an even bigger black hole.

The followups are nicer than the original one, and I think that, in spirit, NW Nevada/Southern Oregon are a better fit for 'far away' places. The desert out there is very high and lonely, in a hauntingly beautiful sort of way. It's also extremely empty.

One place in particular that merits a visit is Steens Mountain - you can drive most of the way up it and hike around. The view from the top is amazing - you can see for miles, and there are very few signs of people visible.

I think this visualization would be far more interesting at the city level. At the country level, it's basically a map of population density. At the city level, I think it might reveal much more about demographic differences between neighborhoods and also do a much better job at highlighting key transit routes/hubs.

Yeah, in all honesty, that graph looks not too different from a map of lights at night (proxy for population density).

> Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience?

An interesting kind of related question is to ask what is the farthest you've ever been away from other humans.

For most of us, we've never been more than a few miles from others.

I've read that the record is probably held by one of the Apollo astronauts who remained in lunar orbit while the landing party landed.

Apollo 13 holds the record for farthest distance from Earth, because in its aborted mission, it swung farther around the moon at higher altitude rather than dropping into lunar orbit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13#Mission_notes

But there were 3 of them together in the capsule.

Apollo 13 holds the record for furthest men have been from the earth.

If we're looking for the furthest any inividual has been away from the nearest second human, we're looking at command module pilots. I think that record goes to Michael Collins, from memory.

Furthest from nearest humans on the earth's surface is probably unknowable; my bet would be on a liferaft somewhere in either the Pacific or Southern oceans about 100 years ago, and the poor individual concerned not making it.

Are you sure? I didn't think lunar orbit was more than a few hundred miles. People who cross oceans solo are much farther away from others than that.

Yes, the lunar orbit of the command module was not far about the lunar surface. That means that when the command module was in the part of its orbit that passed near the part of the Moon where the lander was, the pilot was not far from other people.

However, half an orbit later, he'd be all the way on the other side of the Moon from the nearest people. That's considerably more than a few hundred miles.

Hmm, that's probably right. I thought that whoever visited the bottom of the Marianas Trench might be a contender, but again it turns out that there were two people in the bathyscape.

Even if there was just one person, he would only be about 7 miles away from the surface support ship.

How high is the lunar orbit?

What about some people drifting shipwrecked on the ocean?

The moon is about 60 Earth radii away from the centre of the Earth.

It's considerably further away than someone could get in a boat.

But he's significantly closer to the landing party on the moon.

I meant how far is the moon orbit from the surface of the moon, where the other people were.

At the furthest point in its orbit, the command module was probably about the diameter of the moon (plus a bit) away from the guys on the surface, so ~2000 miles.

The Apollo command module orbit was approximately ~110 kilometers (~60 nautical miles) from the surface. The initial TLI leaves it with a highly elliptical orbit but this is corrected before the LM descent.

I don't know how far above the Moon the command module's orbit was, but the Moon is about 3500 km in diameter, so when the command module was on the opposite side of the Moon from the lunar module, the astronaut in the command module would have been at least 3500 km from any other human.

There are enough inhabited islands in the oceans that it is hard to find a place where you might be 3500 km from anybody. For example, draw a 3500 km circle centered on Hawaii and that takes care of a pretty big chunk of the middle of the Pacific.

Get out of that circle, and you are now close enough to the US, Japan, and New Guinea to have someone within 3500 km.

Southeast prospects are better, but before you get 3500 km from Hawaii, you are within 3500 km of the Pitcairn Islands.

It does look like there might be places in the ocean that are 3500 km from any inhabited place, but then you have to add in 3500 km circles around every ship and every plane (well, slightly smaller for the planes as they are at high altitude). That is going to take a lot out.

And don't forget the International Space Station! If could be over 3000 km from the point it is directly over, and you'd be within 3500 km of it.

The ISS orbits between 330km and 410km above the earth. Really just a hair's breadth off the planet, skimming the outside of the atmosphere.

While distance is one measure of loneliness, travel time would be another.

I'd suspect among the most isolated humans were early Antarctic explorers. Robert Scott, when he died on the return leg of his failed South Pole expedition, was some 400 miles (670 km) from his intended destination. Very few McDonalds' in the neighborhood, I'd wager.

"I'm going for a Big Mac, I may be some time..."?

He should have said "raises the question". " begs the question".means assuming the conclusion of your argument.

Irrelevant, pedantic, and prescriptivist.

...and correct.

So what? It's an incorrect reading of the intended meaning.

It's not pedantic, it totally changes the meaning of the statement.

Common usage has it the other way around - 'begs the question' does mean 'raises the question', simply because that's how it's used. That philosophical jargon has it differently doesn't change that.

And by definition of the individual words it can mean 'demands the (following) question'.

I'm usually sympathetic to that argument, but the origin of 'begs the question' is philosophical jargon, and the misuse of it perpetually reproduces itself from people hearing it being used properly, not understanding what is being said, and trying to parse the phrase to figure out what it means.

Since the phrasing is anachronistic, there's really no chance that they'll come up with 'asks you to accept as true' for 'begs,' and 'the conclusion' for 'the question.' But honestly, if you mean to say 'brings up the question' you should just say it, instead of reaching for an anachronistic pithy phrase or buzzword.

Nobody uses it with that meaning anymore, the phrase has taken on a different meaning. This happens with language, definitions shift, nuance is added, old meanings fall away. If you use the phrase with the original Latin meaning, you'd likely just confuse your listener. It hasn't had that definition in the common parlance for probably the last couple of centuries -- or at least since Latin stopped being necessary for a proper education.

Time to update your dictionary!

Get it right. http://begthequestion.info/

Shouldn't we accept that words change in meaning over time? True, words like "cool" and "gay" gained new meaning via a process of modern association with their understood meanings, but BTQ abuse rises from a misunderstanding of its original use. It would be as though people started using "the die is cast" to mean dying, simply because the word "die" is in there, without any knowledge of Caesar. Is there any idiom -- not a single word, but a full phrase -- whose meaning has changed over the years, simply by virtue of its being misunderstood by the linguistically inept or the historically ignorant?

But language is constantly evolving. That's great to know! Descriptivist linguists, whom we do not fault for their stand, are quite free to watch as we bring about an evolution in the vernacular understanding of "begging the question."

I am right. There's no reason why specific disciplines can't have their own meaning to words and phrases.

Vector, moment, impulse, circuit, computer, etc. all have historic uses that are largely forgotten today or have different meanings in different contexts. Just because a usage is old, or specific to a certain context doesn't mean that usage should be universal or part of the common tongue. Arguing that language is fixed, and should never change is arguing from a special kind of gross ignorance -- the kind where a person has learned enough to think they know it all, but don't actually know anything in particular.

I think the phrase "know enough to be dangerous" comes to mind with most proscriptivists.

If you think I'm wrong, don't ever use vector again unless it's the one I personally think it the correct singular usage, and don't ever use computer unless you are talking about a person who performs calculations.

You reply as if you think I don't know what a descriptivist is. I do. The problem is that I'm not arguing that "language is fixed, and should never change." That is a rather severe misreading of the above link. The point is that people commonly misunderstand the original usage, not that the usage has changed.

I don't think anybody misunderstands the original usage.

I think that most people don't care in the slightest how something Aristotle wrote in Greek was translated into Latin and then awkwardly translated from Latin into English in the 1500s, into an archaic predecessor of modern English that is almost but not quite intelligible to the modern ear. Prior Analytics is not the Bible, it doesn't have to be quoted verbatim in whatever translation you favor to keep Aristotle from smiting you with thunderbolts or some such.

I've definitely never met anyone who used it to mean "I'm about to ask another question" who was aware of the original meaning of the phrase when asked, so we must live at antipodes.

You are wrong.

>Nobody uses it with that meaning anymore, the phrase has taken on a different meaning.

I hear it used in its original meaning as often as I hear it being used in the other way. Losing the original meaning would be a bad thing, because it describes something that is difficult to describe, whereas 'asks me to ask this following question" is just a wordy, empty transition when usually the entire phrase should be replaced with "so."

>[So,] just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?

better?

It's trivial to statistically demonstrate that the new meaning is used far in favor of the old meaning - in language that's all that matters.

You can do this experiment yourself. You will find that the new meaning is so common, so prevalent, that you'll be hard pressed to actually find an example of the old meaning in usage beyond correcting somebody using it in the new meaning.

It's not a zero-sum game. New meaning for words and phrases don't wipe out old meanings. That's why dictionaries developed this novel technique where they list alternate definitions for words -- because all of the definitions are valid because words and phrases can have more than one meaning.

when usually the entire phrase should be replaced with "so."

I don't disagree that "so" is a more concise transition. But it can get old fast when it's used all the time. It may even be better to just ask the question with no lead in at all.

I disagree that "it begs the question" categorically doesn't have a meaning beyond the one coined from a poor translation from a Latin translation of Aristotle's original Greek. Insisting that it can only mean the logical fallacy is ignorant on several kinds of levels and only shows how little the prescriptivist knows about the phrase and how language works in general. You'll find that most aren't even aware that the English phrase we use is not even a correct translation from the Latin and the Latin is not correctly translated from the Greek! It's like a perfect storm of compounded ignoramuses.

The only time I've ever seen "beg the question" used in this way is when people complain about it being used to mean "raises the question".

The original use is for all intents and purposes dead outside of a small group of language purists who mostly appear to be using it to annoy people who use the new meaning.

That the new meaning rises from a misunderstanding of its original use is irrelevant - a lot of language changes are a result of "mistakes" of one form or another.

That's essentially an argument from experience. Michael Quinion disagrees with you. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-beg1.htm

>Nobody uses it with that meaning anymore, the phrase has taken on a different meaning.

Nobody you know, maybe. I remember hearing Tony Blair use it (in the original sense) in Parliament once and I know I've read it several times in British publications.

I wonder if it is still properly used in the UK, then?

I think I remember the Blair usage, and it was notable because it was probably one of the very few usages of the phrase in the original meaning. But it's commonly used in the modern meaning even in UK newspapers.

A piece on it with some numbers on usage

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2010/may/...

"After more than 35 years in journalism I can recall precisely one occasion when "begs the question" was used to describe a logical fallacy, by the philosopher and sometime Guardian columnist Julian Baggini."

The Telegraph has something like 147 usages in the modern meaning and none I could find in the old, I found 1 usage in the old meaning in about 70 in the new meaning in the Financial Times, there's a couple usages in The Times in the modern sense and none in the old.

Here's the singular usage of it in the old sense across these three publications

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e6f9f436-b788-11df-8ef6-00144... (interestingly I believe Caldwell is an American)

If there's more usages in the older sense then I just missed them it's so rare.

I've never actually heard it said out loud in the old meaning and the only time I'm even aware that there was a prior usage of the phrase is when some pretentious, pedantic, proscriptivist with a dangerously improper understanding of how languages work gets involved and tries to correct how other people use the phrase with a hopeless archaic usage that's long since fallen out of fashion.

I don't think I've ever heard the phrase "raises the question" in my entire life. I'd say that phrase, now that I roll it around on my tongue a bit, sounds hopeless awkward and nonsensical. You can't actually "raise" a question, you can raise awareness about a question. You can "ask" a question, or you can have a situation that requires a question be asked -- e.g. the situation can "beg" the question be asked. But raising a question doesn't really make any sort of sense in any possible usage. At any rate, if "raise" is meant to be used in the same way that one can "raise" awareness, then the meaning is still different than begging a question be asked. For example,

"I would like to beg for your awareness about the plight of the African tree frog."

has a more urgent meaning than

"I would like to raise your awareness about the plight of the African tree frog."

I don't just want you to have some slight exposure to the frog, it is of great importance to me that you learn about this frog and his plight. It's so important that I'll beg you to learn about it. Something that is reserved only for people in a desperate situation.

If these meanings of the two words are considered, than a situation can "beg" or "raise" questions with the same sort of urgency qualities as a person.

Thanks for the data, that's very interesting. It's easy to see how the meaning changed as the old usage is not at all intuitive to the modern ear.

But as for 'raises the question' I'm sure it is fairly common, I get 23 m hits on nytimes.com. I have no idea where to find a count of usage like you did for 'begs the question'. I also don't really have a problem with using it in general. I just take it to mean bringing a question to someone's attention with no particular urgency (or lack thereof) attached.

Despite my grumpiness about English prescriptivism (and having to wade through the seas of absurd self-reinforced linguistic ignorance that usually comes with it) I don't really have a problem if people use "raise a question" or "beg a question" or "ask a question" or much to the prescriptivist's chagrin "aks a question" since "ask" was actually "aks" at around the same time "begs the question" was translated into English and had been for at least 600 years (from "acsian")and hadn't yet been influenced by the Scandinavian form "aeske".

The most important quality of all in language is the simple question "does it succeed in communicating?" I've seen many writings, in dense, linguistically correct, nuanced English that utterly failed to communicate at all, and many writings by semi-literate teenagers that succeeded despite great irregularities in their usage of the tongue.

Every English speaker knows what "begs the question" means in the modern meaning, it is effective communication. Very few people know in the old. It is not effective to communicate using the old meaning with a modern general audience. That is poor use of Language.

I know it's not really related but still... this article reminded of the section in the book 'Behind The Golden Arches' that discussed that although many people think that there are too many McDonald's restaurants around, there are still more car dealerships.

And how many times do you buy a car compared to a burger?

So this article claims around 13,000 McDonald's restaurants, and I just found a page that claims 37,500 separate car and truck dealership franchises.

I don't know exactly what it is about those numbers that amaze me but every time I think about it I'm gobsmacked...

Does that include all car brands? What happens when you include all fast food burger joints (Burger King, Wendy's, etc.)?

That's a good question and I really don't know. To be perfectly honest, though, in my head, at least, any number less than maybe 10 fast food restaurants to each car dealership is low on the fast food restaurant side I reckon... but again, that's just my gut feeling about the ratio.

Except, a single McDonalds can serve ~5 orders a minute. Yet, a car dealership that can sell 2 cars a day is doing Ok. Let's assume 2 cars a day over 5 years = 3,650people before you get repeat customers. (Average salesman sells 7 cars a month * 8 sales guys.)

Edit: http://www.bluemaumau.org/6057/ten_largest_restaurant_franch... 2 million / store per year / 52 weeks / 6$ a meal = 6,410 people averaging 1 vist a week per McDonalds.

When you say "separate ... dealership franchises", are you counting each physical location once, or once per brand? Around here, many dealerships carry multiple brands. Also, there tend to be multiple dealerships clustered together (probably due to zoning, and tax incentives that some municipalities offer), so they're not as smoothly distributed as McDonalds. Still, those are amazing numbers!

There are small towns around where I grew up that have a car dealership, but no McDonalds. Or multiple car dealerships to a single McDonalds.

Hmm, come to think of it I think towns of 20-30k usually have 2 or 3 car dealers (usually one each for the big 3), but only a single McDonalds.

To be honest I just took the numbers from http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_car_dealerships_are_in_Am... which claims to quote the National Automobile Dealers Association. More completely that page says "more than 17,000 new car and truck dealers with approximately 37,500 separate franchises" so even without the 'separate franchises' the number is still higher.

But yeah, I agree that the numbers are amazing...

Don't forget people go to dealerships also for maintenance and repair, not just to buy a car.

I might buy burgers more often than cars, but my total spend on buying cars is rather higher.

I'm also choosier about cars than burgers. I've never inspected 15 burgers and read their delivery history before buying one. And burgers are rather easier to store in bulk, too.

So, yeah, know what you mean but I'm not surprised cars trump fast food.

The place I grew up was 103 miles away from the closest McDonald's. There were people there that would drive to McDonald's for breakfast.

I grew up in rural Australia, and we used to host a ton of exchange students from North America.

Driving from Melbourne back to my home town, there is a huge billboard saying "Next McDonalds 100km" (60 mi.). Many times we would have to pull over so the American exchange students could take a photo, as they were in disbelief they were so far away from one.

On that same road you're easily 250km (130mi.) away, but there is no sign.

Ah, but there may be a McDonalds behind you that's much closer!

Haha, no. It's a 500km (310mi.) drive, and there is only a McDonalds at the start and one at the end.

I find this hard to believe (grew up in Swan Hill).

Where are you heading to from Melbourne? I doubt you could stay in Victoria and be more than 250km from a McDonalds.

Maybe in the Wimmera?

You're certainly far from Macca's when you head up the Cobb in NSW, though.

Eyeballing Macca's Australian website [1], I'd say that the furthest point would be equidistant from Kalgoorlie, Broome and Alice Springs. That's pretty close to the north-eastern corner of the Gibson Desert Nature Reserve [2], 800km from the nearest McDonalds.

[1] http://mcdonalds.com.au/find-us/restaurant

[2] http://g.co/maps/pehrm

Yeah, somewhere between Swan Hill, Mildura and Horsham. Big Desert, or into eastern SA would get you a fair way from a McDonalds.

Ha. I have not actually been back to Oz for 6 years now.. and apparently things have changed a lot. I didn't know there was one in Horsham, or Renmark for that matter.

I was originally referring to the Melbourne->Mildura drive, but obviously I need to update my facts. Sorry 'bout that.

Most Americans have no taste-buds. They don't eat lamb, and prefer grain-fed beef (which tastes like slightly gamey chicken) to grass-fed beef (which has a much more ... beefy ... flavor). And don't even think of offering them kangaroo.

On the other hand, I'm sure there's some Minnesotan here, who'll tell me I'm a wimp for not eating gopher. Regional US food rocks, but generic "US food" is just bland.

Meh, I eat plenty of lamb, and I know plenty of people who do as well. It's certainly not as popular as beef, but probably mainly because it's much pricier.

Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame (three Michelin star restaurant in Napa) states in his cookbook that he actually prefers to use beef that's been finished on grain. Personally, I like both.

Deer is delicious, if you haven't had it.

> "Regional US food rocks, but generic "US food" is just bland."

So. So true.

American food is friggin' amazing, but you'd never know it if all you ate was what is normally labeled "American food".

Gopher? Tame! Come visit New Orleans some time, we have the crazy stuff.

That, and the American Craft Beer movement would like to have a word with you.

>They don't eat lamb, and prefer grain-fed beef

That really has as much to do with cost as anything. Grass-fed beef can be twice the price of grain-fed, and lamb's definitely not cheap, either.

I'm surprised it's not corn-fed beef - corn's a lot cheaper.

Corn is a grain.

Sorry, read that backwards (grass vs. grain). My mistake.

[shrug] depends on where you are. I have an ad somewhere for a local farm (Minnesota) selling grass fed beef for under $3 lb if you buy 1/4 animal or more.

No way the corn-fed supermarket stuff can touch that price!

I remember seeing a sign on the Sturt highway that said the next McDonalds was 450kms away in Wagga Wagga. I may have a picture of it somewhere. Though I checked and it does not exist anymore.

You might get really far away from one if you were in central Western Australia somewhere, though with the mining boom still happening that may not be the case.

> You might get really far away from one if you were in central Western Australia somewhere, though with the mining boom still happening that may not be the case.

Last I checked (a couple of months ago), there isn't a McDonalds in Newman, or east of Newman.

It's a bit of a rite of passage for Adelaidean teens, particularly after final exams, to drive from Adelaide to that Macdonalds on the outskirts of Melbourne and then back home again. Within speed limits I think it is about fifteen hours return.

Not only is this an interesting factoid, but the author is also a very good writer. I recommend reading the follow up articles.

I think his result might be wrong. It doesn't jump out at you from his map since it's on an edge of the area, but it also has big voids on the northeast corner of Minnesota and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. If you examine carefully, you can pick out Kinross, Gladstone, Escanaba, Marquette, Iron Mountain, Ironwood, Ashland, Duluth, Two Harbors, Hibbing, Eveleth, Virginia, and International Falls. That means the tip of Pigeon Point would put you a good 130 miles or so from the nearest U.S. McDonald's in Two Harbors, Minnesota, compared to 115 miles for the author's spot in northwestern Nevada.

The northeast tip of Isle Royale would be a little farther still, if you want to count islands that are part of the lower 48. And the northeast tip of Keweenaw County wouldn't be as far from the nearest McDonald's as the crow flies, but might be the longest drive from any McDonald's, at 143 miles by road from Marquette, in a loop around Keweenaw Bay.

I also found it interesting to compare the map defined by distance to nearest McDonald's with a light pollution map of the lower 48, used to find excellent dark sky locations for setting up one's telescope. McDonald's and light pollution largely overlap in tracing population density and major highways, but McDonald's is also overrepresented relative to light pollution in isolated areas that are popular vacation destinations. This jumped out as most apparent in south central Utah, and also holds for Arizona and New Mexico. The McDonald's voids are vast areas that are not only isolated, but also boring.

Indeed, the Arrowhead of Minnesota and Isle Royale are farther from the nearest U.S. McDonald's, as the crow flies, but they're only about fifty miles from the Micky Dee's in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

From a cursory look, the plots just seems to correspond with population density more than anything else.

Very closely, I'd say:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...

The major difference I see is the McDonaldses following highways in the western states -- for example, look at the sparsely populated parts of Montana.

And even there, it's possible that the McDonald's density matches the population density. That's just not what's graphed.

What I find most striking about this map is that it is eerily similar to maps of distance from or concentration of supermarkets in the US, which are fairly commonly used after Ravenstein's human mobility studies to track things like urban expansion. Simply put, this map would suggest to me that McDonald's has become so entrenched that it actually serves as a reliable landmark for human evolutionary and sociological studies. Which is frightening.

>Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?

I'm an insomniac much of the time. Some weeks/months I don't sleep until it's light out. Out here in suburban Chicago, the only places still open to me when it's late and I'm hungry are 7-11, McDonald's, and Burger King. So I'll take "generic convenience," because it at least makes my life a little easier to be able to get something resembling food when there's nothing else open.

(Yes, I could plan ahead and put things in my fridge and cook food. I'll get back to you when I have the energy or the inclination to do that).

Don't expect high energy when you munch on McDonalds, look into what proper nutrition can do for your body and mind.

My energy level problems stem from something else, because I've not had any of it since I was 12. Still trying to find the cause.

Maybe it's your diet.

My diet was very different before I got to college.

This sounds like a vicious circle to me.

I do the same, because (perhaps you share this) there's a certain, hard-to-define, yet ceaseless wonder to wandering into a 7-Eleven or a Walgreens late at night and foraging for just the right snack. I don't know why, but it's an experience I enjoy.

I would like to see a similar analysis based on venture funded, active startups. Obviously in the valley they are concentrated, but outside the valley it would be an interesting analysis.

I can't find the source for the life of me, but I remember reading an article about 6 months back that declared basically "there is not a single square foot of land inside the continental USA that is considered 'silent' any longer".

In other words, no matter where you "go to get away" in the USA, you will never truly leave the buzz of the city.

EDIT: Perhaps this is it http://geohazards.usgs.gov/staffweb/mcnamara/PDFweb/McNamara...

If you want quiet try caving 100m down and it's like another world.

I just skimmed that paper very quickly, and it seems to include wind and water. If you count all the noises that nature makes, nowhere on the planet is going to be "silent".

I remember when I was a kid (late 80s early/mid 90s), and I'd visit my aunt in California (I'm from Georgia). It seemed almost like a different country--different stores, different architecture, different culture. The same was true for rural areas closer to home.

Now everywhere I go, there's a Walmart, a McDonalds, an Applebees/Chilis/TGI-Fridays, a BestBuy, a Staples/OfficeMax/Office Depot, and a Home Depot, or Lowes.

The world feels a lot smaller.

It still feels like a different country because it's happening globally. I just moved to London and there's a fucking Whole Foods around the corner! Closer in fact than it was when I lived in Mountain View, Santa Fe, or Minneapolis (all big Whole Foods markets).

That was an entertaining but true and worrisome article, enlightening. When I was in my 20's I might have thought wow, South Dakota needs more McDonald's.

Subway became the largest restaurant chain in the world recently. Is it, perhaps, more apt to ask how far one can get from one of them?

If you like maps like this and are from Boston, check out http://bostonography.com

Lol, I initially read the link as:

The United States, visualized by distance to the nearest McDonald's (DISAPPOINTED.net)

If you look closely you can see his coloring algorithm is broken. The "spheres" of close restaurants appear to "squash" each other rather than just intersecting. The result is grooves between restaurant spheres that should be more brightly coloured. If anyone even notices this comment and replies to it, I expect them to be disagreeing with me.

TL;DR: I can tell by the pixels.

This was the top comment when I connected, and I agree with your analysis.

The algorithm isn't broken, the zones you're talking about are squashed together to show you, at any given point, which McDonalds is the closest to that location. It's like a Voronoi diagram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram).

For a map intended to show the distance of points from the nearest McDonalds' that isn't the best algorithm; equal pixel colour should => equal distance. I was thinking it'd be cool if distance were represented by height, in a 3D rendering. Also, make it a flythrough, with music :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com