He didn't find a correlation, or rather found that there is no correlation, between proximity to a railway station and how the kebab is reviewed. It's a nice study for a statistics class!
A more accurate aphorism would be "You can sell good kebabs anywhere, but you can only sell bad kebabs near a train station."
And if you look at the "minimum viable quality" instead of the overall quality, there does seem to be a linear correlation with the distance. You can use a 5% quantile regressor to easily find the lower edge of the distribution.
Insightful!
97.38% of bad studies measure the wrong variable.
Do drunk french people buy kebabs? In my city one central late night kebab place has great kebabs. Anecdotally I remember one great kebab cart serving at least one drunken customer in Nice (France) - not near a station and a long way from the Paris metro!
I think there's some population selection flaws. Drunk people don't leave reviews. In foreign countries it is difficult to know the correct search term.
I suggest an alternative study: how much lager does it need to make a train station kebab taste great?
Yes, very much.
Source: lived in France for two years. Bought a lot of kebabs. Drank with French people a lot.
Also, I really miss French kebabs. They use the thick pide bread, and harissa sauce is always available. Also, if you order an "American" one, they put fries in it.
I don't think so? It's mostly a result of the fact that (obviously) the best place to sell food is where there are people, which is also the best place to put a metro station. So on average the kebabs are pretty good and on average they're near a station. In Figure 9 one of the worst reviewed restaurants is over 3km from a metro.
You're likely seeing a pattern where there isn't one, which is normal for humans.
There's one obvious place to go around here for a good kebab, it's a few minutes walk to the station, but the way you can tell it's the best place for a kebab is how late it's open every night. Long after other kebab places are dark they're still doing enough business to justify remaining open.
The best place for pizza in my city is very close to a train station but that's a total accident, they park (it's a van, no really, best pizza in the city but they hated owning a restaurant so they put their oven in a van instead) in the car park of a railway station's pub about five minutes walk from me.
Is that a quality signal, or just a sign they don't mind selling to people going back from parties, in various stages of being drunk? I always assumed the latter. Few restaurants (McDonald's and KFC aside) want to work those hours, so whichever does is almost guaranteed a steady trickle of customers who literally have nowhere else to eat (other than home). There isn't much pressure for quality in this situation.
However, thinking about it more carefully, while I've never bought a kebab from them technically the Chaiiwala which is 24/7 does sell kebabs. They're a bit fancier (and of course, more Indian) than the kebab you'd get from the kebab shop but that's definitely a chicken kebab. Their clientèle in the middle of the night are a mix of "gig workers" and people either going to or coming back from prayers (for whichever of the religions is into praying when other people are in bed - Islam and maybe others?). I have never seen drunk young people in there, but it is open 24/7 so that must happen once in a while.
That logic definitely does not apply to SF Bay Area. Most of the places that stay open are all pretty meh. A few pizza by the slice places, Dennys, Grubstake, Orphan Andy's, Mel's. Oakland and LA (SoCal) are no better.
AFAIK most places have no interest in staying open late. Maybe they don't want to stay up. Maybe they don't want to deal with drunks. So, given there are so few, the few that are open have no competition.
I been to / lived in cities that actually have good late night options. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore. California has a curfew which doesn't help.
Basically nobody bothering to report about Kebab shops that are neither good nor conveniently located. Probably not, but "one quadrant empty" is a handy red flag that you might encounter Berkson's.
This is a big difference. There are hundreds of Metro stations in Paris. Everywhere is close to one.
I think the original intent was distance to a train station. If Paris is anything like Rome, close to the railway station is cheap hostels and recent immigrants accommodations.
Let x=[-5..+5] and y=[25,16,9,4,1,0,1,4,9,16,25] (that is, x²). The Pearson correlation coefficient, R², will be zero. We know that y is dependent on x, but isn't linearly dependent.