Showing posts with label fast food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fast food. Show all posts

August 02, 2010

Fast Food Fights: The Colonel and the Clown

One would be hard pressed to find two faces more associated with fast food than those of the colonel and the clown. The ubiquity of McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken are what makes America great. Or at least great of girth. But, more importantly, how do the geographies of the competing food chains differ?

Colonel Sanders vs. Ronald McDonald
When comparing Google Maps references to the iconic faces of these two fast food franchises, some very interesting spatial patterns emerge. For the most part, Colonel Sanders is a more prominent presence throughout the American landscape than Ronald McDonald. And while references to each are somewhat sparse throughout the rest of the world, these places are almost uniformly more favorable to Ronald McDonald.

Apparently the world prefers diplomacy (clownish or otherwise) over military expansionism. Who knew?

Building on this, we wondered who might win the virtual competition between these fast food icons and the animals associated with their staple menu items.

Colonel Sanders vs. Chicken

Ronald McDonald vs. Cow

From the first map, it would appear that the chickens of the world (no doubt inspired by our call to arms for the pigs) have begun waging a full on counter attack on the Colonel - even extending the battle to his relatively safe territory within the U.S. In fact, Colonel Sanders is so overwhelmed by the number of Google Maps references to chicken that it appears he's in some kind of virtual hiding place.

Ronald McDonald is, however, faring much better against the cows of the world. Although the bovine predominance is noticeable, the man with the painted face is showing that it doesn't take military commendations (or a fancy certificate from the Governor of Kentucky) to win the virtual battle, just really big shoes.

March 09, 2010

Guest Map: The Burger Force

The cyber-badger recently sent us this fascinating map of the "burger force" of fast-food restaurants in the US made by Stephen Von Worley.

Worley describes "burger force" as:

...a field of energy that radiates from every freshly-cooked patty, earth-penetrating and inverse-squared with distance, compelling the hungry carnivore to seek out and devour the well-done ground beef at the source.

Unlike all of the maps featured on this blog, the "burger force" map is not based on user-created content. It is rather based on the actual locations of businesses. For those interested in the data behind the map check out AggData. It should therefore be interesting to see how similar a map user-created content referencing the same terms will be. Or in other words, is the burger force of McDonald's as strong in cyberscapes as it is throughout most of the US?

Good thing we are currently running searches on "colonel sanders" and "ronald mcdonald".