Hey, there! Log in / Register
The chain coffee center of Massachusetts
By adamg on Thu, 06/10/2010 - 3:25pm
For some reason, the Globe today posted a map showing every single Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks in this great state of ours. Not surprisingly, greater Boston is just one giant blotch of red (the color they used to show Dunk's outlets). But that got me to thinking (often not a good thing). Where, exactly, is the galactic center of this vast coffee way?
Theoretically, should be easy enough to calculate: Just grab all the coordinates of all those pushpins, average them out, and voila.
Took a bit of rummaging around in the source code for the Globe map, since they didn't put the coordinates on the page itself (no doubt for page-loading speed reasons). Fortunately, I was able to find the separate page where they stored the values. I grabbed those, put 'em all into a spreadsheet, ran the averages and determined that if you want to stand where you'll be closer to a Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks than anywhere else in Massachusetts, i.e., in the very epicenter of chain coffeeness, you need to take Rte. 1 south into Foxborough and slow down as you pass North Street (and the McDonald's), get out and stand on the sidewalk by the woods in, basically, the middle of nowhwere. Such is the irony of coffee density in the Bay State.
Earlier:
Determining the coffee center of Boston.
Topics:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
huh?
yeah.. this doesn't make any sense. I can think of multiple places in the state where there are side-by-side DD&Bucks... so standing there you would be closest to either a DD or bucks.
Think macro, not micro
Sure, sure, you could stand by the ticket machines in Back Bay station and
cough a lung outbe just several strides away from two whole Dunkin' Donuts, or, I bet, stand by the outbound platform at Government Center and be equidistant from two Dunk's, provided you were a human mole and could burrow upwards through concrete and steel, but ...Let's say you were a visitor from another planet and were uniquely sensitive to the aroma rays of sweet, sweet Dunkin' Donuts coffee (and, OK, that charred stuff that passes for coffee at Starbucks), so attuned to it, in fact, that you could savor it for miles around.
In that case, then, you'd want to stand by the side of that stretch of Rte. 1, because, of all the places in Massachusetts, that is where you'd be most deeply enmeshed in the sheer joy of it. Think of it as the very center of the Massachusetts coffee galaxy.
Or, to get right to the point, as Kaz points out, yeah, kind of a nerd here.
Hey.
NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDD!!
I suppose you don't want to know how I spent last night ...
Replacing Windows on the netbook I just bought with Ubuntu (and only partly so I could walk around going "Ubuntu! It's Swahili for, um, Ubuntu!").
Actually, the replacing part was very easy - Ubuntu is almost Windows-like, only without all the problems - it was downloading the 700M notebook version (which comes with most of the apps a Windows refugee would need) on our increasingly flaky DSL line that took forever. That, and playing the Civilization clone I discovered in the Ubuntu apps "store" (where everything is free, as far as I could tell).
Beats me
I spent the night leading one quarter of a raid on Destruction's Inevitable City with my Dwarf Engineer. We didn't start the siege in time before I logged off, but it was fun leading my warband through Black Crag and Caledor.
Also, if you learned nothing else from the 2008 Celtics, let it be that "Ubuntu" can be summed up as "unity" in simple terms in English (this was what they said when they huddled before the game).
Oh, right
I keep forgetting they weren't yelling "Debian."
How come only DD & Starbucks?
I know there only a couple in MA, but what about Tim Hortons?!
More important
What about Honey Dew Donuts?
Or, or...
Marylou's.
The best coff-ee in toowwwwnnn.
More like...
Marylou's.
The worst comm-errr-cials in toowwwwnnn.
Mary Lou's must be a South Shore thing
Because to this north-of-Boston native, I don't think I've ever passed one anywhere other than Quincy. As far as anything on the South Shore, it may as well be China to most of us who hail from north of the city. For example, I went to a cookout in Hanson on Sunday and when asked by my sister where Hanson was, I quite accurately replied "somewhere between Braintree and Florida".
Florida the state or Florida,
Florida the state or Florida, MA? ;)
Something I'm not understanding here
If I stand in front of Sears Crescent in Government Center, there's a Starbucks and a Dunkin side-by-side. In Davis Square, they are a short half block from each other on the same side of Elm Street. So I don't get how this obscure location on Route 1 is "closer to a Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks than anywhere else in Massachusetts".
Maybe "closer" is the wrong word then
It's the center of coffee gravity in Massachusetts.
Special fancy word for it
Centroid.
Center, not "closer"
This is the "center" of all of those coffee places. It's not closer to any ONE of them...but it is closer to ALL of them at once than any other spot in the world.
D'ya trust this map?
I zoomed into jamaica plain and looked at DDs there. According to the map, there's one at 80 Boylston St. I walk past 80 Boylston St every morning (& evening). No DD there. Either I'm a Muggle or the map is plain wrong. I think it's the latter (maybe even some of the former). I wonder how many more pushpins are wrong. If you're lucky, your central location might just turn out to be Gilette stadium.
Downtown
There's a Dunkies at 80 Boylston downtown. They must have gotten the two Boylstons confused.
...and
"There's a Dunkies at 80 Boylston downtown"- and there's a Starbucks just across the street on the other side of Tremont.
A short walk away, at the Transportation building, there's another Dunkin/Starbucks pairing.
Sigh: Google Maps and Boston
Yeah, if you type "80 Boylston St., Boston, MA" into Google Maps, you get back the JP location. You have to specify the Zip code to get the right one.
Oh, noes, does this call into question the validity of all the data, or is this just an outlier cancelled out by other outliers?
could be worse...
google maps puts my sisters town in the middle of a lake. the town is not, in fact, under water.
Enfield, MA?
Enfield, MA?
randolph, vermont.
and they basically won't fix it.
my sister (not a musician) even wrote a little song about it:
http://icanhaz.com/hayguggle
I can't find this on the map
Ware is it?
(This is in reference to Enfield, MA, not Randolph!)
it's under the quabbin...
it was part of the Swift River Valley, and the town was disincorporated in 1938 and flooded soon afrer to make the quabbin. dana, prescott, and greenwich also lie under the quabbin. these four are referred to as the "lost towns".
a couple years back the globe did a short piece on some of the remaining lost town residents.
Giggle
Yeah, I knew that. I was trying to be cute with the "Ware".
~crud~
i hate it when i miss teh funny.
Go to your library to learn more
There's an historic novel written by former Governor Bill Weld called "Stillwater". The story is set in the towns just as Curley's men come to flood the towns. It's a nice, quick summer read.
(note: this should be signed DGA, aka Mr. Swirlygrrl)
I agree that I don't
I agree that I don't completely trust this map. In the vicinity of Kendall Square, for example, it shows one DD at One Broadway (correct), one farther up Broadway near where it intersects with Market St. (correct), and another that's marked about where the main entrance to the inbound T station is (marked "Kendall/MIT"). What? I haven't figured out what they're referring to with that one - even the DD at MIT is correctly listed as being over in the student center on the other side of Mass Ave.
Adam, Adam,
Adam, Adam, Adam......
Sometimes you make me wonder two things.......
1) How you have all this free time
2) How your wife puts up with you....
Barring that, we all know the center of the coffee universe is wherever you can get a cup in the morning
Sometimes she wonders that, too
But, really, took me less time to do this than the post about the kid from upstate New York who decided he needed a gun to visit Boston:
Took me a couple of minutes to figure out where the Globe was keeping their data (had to try a couple of the URLs listed as JavaScript "sources" in the source code of the Globe map). Copied the file to my trustee copy of HomeSite (an HTML editor). Did a search and replace to delete all the weird brackets and change the stuff between latitude and longitude values to tabs. Saved as a CSV, brought it up in whatever they call the OpenOffice equivalent of Excel, summed the respective values, divided each by the number of values and voila: A latitude and longitude to plug into Google Maps.
um, yeah...... sure, whatever
um, yeah......
sure, whatever you just said
you keep doing what your doing, and i"ll keep doing what I do because what you just said means nothing to me :)
Doooooughboy...
Not only the best coffee, but, brilliantly, ONE location! (Dot. Ave between A and B, it rocks my world.)
you obviously have too much
you obviously have too much time on your hands
Thanks for taking the time to
Thanks for taking the time to let me know.
Of course there is an online
Of course there is an online calculator for this:
http://www.geomidpoint.com/
Neal, don't worry, South
Neal, don't worry, South Shore folks feel the same way about the North Shore. This map didn't include sites located inside other facilities, such as Dunkins in gas stations or Stop & Shops, and Starbucks in Target or Barnes & Noble. I wonder what effect those locations would have on the epicenter.
Dunkin Donuts inside other facilities
are listed in Somerville (the only city I checked): a convenience store in Powderhouse Circle, a gas station on Route 16, another gas station on McGrath Highway, and a Super Stop & Shop (though either its address is wrong or Google isn't correctly mapping it)
There's a DD inside...
...the Reggie Lewis Athletic Facility at Roxbury Community College. This amuses me.
Geographic center, not Galactic center
I'm sure you mean the "geographic center" -- you surely didn't do the curvature corrections in order to calculate the "geodetic center" -- or the "mean population center" for the distribution of coffee houses, not the Galactic center.
The latter is dominated by a black hole whose gravity sucks things towards it. Dunkins, of course, only generates repellent forces.
The geographic center for Massachusetts is in Rutland, FWIW. The geographic center for the lower-48 is somewhere in Kansas, while the mean population center is somewhere in Missouri.
Or maybe I was just trying out a stupidly subtle pun
Because some people put milk in their coffee, as in, oh, via galactica?
In any case, no, I didn't do any curvature corrections (I admit: never even heard of those, dammit, Jim, I'm a reporter, not a mathematician), and I'm growing increasingly dismayed at the inaccuracy of the Globe data, both in terms of stupid Google-can't-deal-with-Boston stuff and the lack of in-store Dunk's at supermarkets and the like.
I would take issue with your assertion of DD repellency, however. Some of use have a certain strange attraction to it (talk about going from the macro to the micro); maybe it's all the the product hawking radiating from the TV every time you turn on a Sox game. It would certainly explain why, right after passing the Dunkin' Donuts at the Government Center T stop, you come upstairs to see a Dunkin' Donuts and then, if you walk toward Park Street, you see another Dunkin' Donuts roughly 5 seconds later. In any event, they're all over the horizon.
OK, I will shut up now!
Self-imposed boycott
Dunks is fine as coffee goes if you know what you're expecting. However, ever since they sued a franchisee because his wife opened a cafe here in Brighton, I've chosen not to give them any of my money if given a choice.
If you're going to do that,
If you're going to do that, then you'll be collection roots and grubs for yourself pretty soon. Every company has done something similar somewhere along the line. Man cannot live by holier-than-thou boycotts along.
This reminds me of the former (and current) DD ownership..
back when Allied Domecq owned DD, I used to tell my Irish friends who had foam and plastic purple and orange containers permanently fused to their hands, that DD was owned by an ENGLISH company, and that they were supporting the Crown by giving them their coffee money. Similar joshing towards my extreme flag-waving friends: you know you're supporting a FOREIGN company don't you? I mean, Starbucks is an American company! Buy American, ya dadgum traitor!~
Then, wasn't the company bought by Bain Capital ...or at least partially so? Well, now I josh my extremely loyal democrat and/or friends, that they are giving their money to BIG BUSINESS and MITT ROMNEY every time they buy a cup of DD.
I know I'm stretching the truth, but hey, my friends deserve the very best of joshing, truth be damned. heh heh heh
My choice
If I felt it necessary to become my own hunter/gatherer because I'm not willing to spend my money on every company for my own reasons, then I would. As it stands, I've done just fine by not stepping foot into a Dunks since I chose not to. Your slippery slope is neither slippery nor much of a slope considering the vast number of companies that sell coffee that I don't disagree with in any way.
If we don't vote with our money, then they can do whatever they like and we will suffer for it. Compromise your own principles, not mine.
Not to mention ...
the large number of companies that serve coffee that doesn't taste like it was burnt in a plastics factory.
My preference is now for a local place (90%) or Starbucks (in my building and an occasional purchase means wifi access just about anywhere I travel)
No need for curvature
No need for curvature correction on this scale - the difference is slight.
Two DD's across the street
Two DD's across the street from each other on Route 16 in Everett; if you miss the one while you're heading westbound, don't worry, there's another about 1/4 mile down the road.
You should do one about the
You should do one about the CVS center of Massachusetts. I'm always amazed by the number of DDs and CVSs here. Sometimes you can look from one and see the other.