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Comment by rhplus | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to know where the highest density of Starbucks is in the world. My obvious guess is downtown Seattle or maybe Manhattan or central London. I'd love to see someone compute the metric, perhaps the highest number of Starbucks within a specific square mile or maybe the specific location on earth which has the most Starbucks within say 1 mile.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=starbucks+in+downtown+seattle

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Also, if you're caring about the density of specialty coffee in Downtown Seattle (where I am now) you would want to take other shops into account. There's a Starbucks on just about every corner, but on every other corner you'll find a Stumptown or a Vita or a Ladro or a Vivace or...

I've always wondered about the drivers for this density of coffee shop. The density seems a lot lower in most UK cities. Is it that people have small apartments? Or is it to save office space?

Neither. Most homes and offices still have coffee making equipment. It's more of a social and cultural thing. In my case, my regular barista is one of the few people in my life who never has unreasonable expectations of me :)

I'd like to find the spot in King County/Seattle area that's the farthest from espresso. I'm going to venture a guess that it's in the middle of a lake.

King County is very large and a lot of it is rural or forest service land. I know Seattle owns a lot of land in the Cedar river watershed since that is the city's water supply. I'd guess somewhere out there is the farthest spot.

Seattle might own it, but it's not part of the city.

Cursory playing around with Google Maps indicates that it is probably somewhere on the coast in Magnolia.

In India, we have Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) instead of Starbucks. I have noticed that the concentration of CCDs in certain regions of Bangalore is much higher than that of Starbucks in Manhattan (I've been to both). At some places in Bangalore you find a CCD for every hundred square meters.

Of course, you also have a whole lot more people in that area. Perhaps a better measure is stores per capita per square mile/km?

so that USA wins? :) cafes per square km would be a more interesting measure than Starbucks per km I think.

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