Monday, March 3, 2008

Walmart vs. Starbucks

This post at the Columbia statistics blog shows the relationship between the number of Walmarts and Starbucks per million people for each state. This is interesting (but so not surprising) to me because West Virginia has the fourth most Walmarts (approximately 60 per million people) and the second fewest Starbucks (less than 20 per million people). West Virginia's population is roughly 1.8 million, so doing some fuzzy math there should be about 100-110 Walmarts.
 
According to the Walmart Facts website, however, there are only 37 stores and 5 Sam's Clubs. That's one Walmart store for every 42,000 people. In Michigan, it's 111 total Walmart stores, one for every 89,000 people. So there is effectively twice the number of Walmart's per person in West Virginia, but the huge number implied by Columbia can't be right. And like one of the commenters mentioned, there are some Walmarts that contain Starbucks.

I'd like to see a graph of the number of Chinese products per capita as a function of the quantity of lottery tickets purchased. It's correlation, sure, but it can be so telling.

3 comments:

Nick said...

Nerd.

Good stuff though. I woouldn't have read the Columbia statistics blog otherwise!

matt pryor said...

I just added this to my RSS feeds so expect some wacky comments.

Ben said...

Sweet, wackiness.