The (Rust) Belt of Basic-ness? Mapping the Pumpkin Spice Latte

As fall gives way to winter, we're all left clinging to the best vestiges of the passing season: the changing leaves, college football, temperatures above freezing and, for many of the most basic amongst us, the pumpkin spice latte. Debuted by Starbucks in 2004, and featuring no actual pumpkin content, the pumpkin spice latte has become a staple of fall, with Ugg boots and yoga pants-wearing women practically crawling out of the woodwork to get their hands on the thing. And while Starbucks touts that over 29,000 tweets have mentioned #pumpkinspice since 2012, we suspected there was much more to the story of the pumpkin spice latte [1]. Despite the fervor, we noticed that there's been no definitive tracking of the geographical expansion of the pumpkin spice latte as it seeks to colonize the world of regular, everyday people drinking plain ol' coffee.

Searching only for the latest manifestation of the pumpkin spice phenomena, we collected all geotagged tweets in the continental United States for September and October 2014 with references to either "pumpkin spice" or "#psl", yielding a total of 19,537 tweets. But rather than simply mapping the basic distribution of these tweets, we've instead normalized this data by tweets referencing "coffee" during the same period. Using a 25% sample of all of these coffee-related tweets -- totaling 42,696 tweets -- aggregated to hexagonal cells, we calculated the odds ratio at the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval in order to provide a bit more context and account for any number of biases within the data. Using this measure, we've identified those places with greater-than-usual numbers of pumpkin spice latte tweets relative to those tweets referencing coffee (orange), and vice versa (purple), as seen in the map below.

References to Pumpkin Spice Lattes relative to References to Coffee [2]

Based on our binary classification, it's evident that the vast majority of the country has stuck with their preference for coffee, even during the PSL's peak season. But given that our interest is in mapping the prevalence of the PSL in particular, we want to pay closer attention to the smattering of orange hexagons in the map. While there are no definitive clusters of PSL-related tweeting, if you squint your eyes you can just barely visualize a belt of pro-PSL places stretching from St. Louis up to Chicago, and from Cincinnati up to Toledo and Detroit, and from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, what we've termed "the basic belt". While this belt roughly corresponds to the vernacular region of the Rust Belt, Ohio in particular sits at the center of this pumpkin spice-loving portion of the country, representing the buckle on our belt [3]. Given this clustering of PSLs, we suspect that the Buckeye State might well be on its way to becoming the Pumpkin Spice State.
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[1] Well, actually, Renee Kaufmann had this hunch. All credit for the idea behind this post goes to her.
[2] Sorry about the Web Mercator projection, y'all.
[3] Can one still wear a belt with yoga pants?

Rust Belt Bowling

What is one to make of Robert Putnam's now-infamous assertion that despite bowling reaching an all-time high in popularity, it's new found nature as a solitary activity is indicative of a decline in civic engagement, increasing social isolation and alienation amongst Americans? Although it cannot support any definitive conclusions, the relative concentration of listings of bowling alleys in the Google Maps directory[1] tells an interesting story about where this process of social isolation might be taking hold.


The above map shows places in which the number of listings for bowling alleys in a single place exceeds the national average number of listings by 20% (i.e., only indexed values >1.2 are shown). Although some of these places continue to show the dominance of urban areas (the larger a place is the more bowling alleys it might have), this explanation is far from sufficient. The maximum indexed value is located in Southfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, a highly unlikely location, given that listings in Google Maps directory are concentrated in major cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Further inspection shows that much of the activity mirrors the extent of the American Rust Belt, a region formerly known for its dominance in the manufacturing industry, now known more for its collective decline in the face of a severe economic downturn.

So what does this spatial correlation mean? A loose application (and we mean loose) of the theories of Max Weber (the 'iron cage') and Karl Marx (alienation of labor) might show that due to their full integration into the world of capitalist manufacturing, individuals living throughout the Rust Belt have turned to bowling as a refuge from their work lives, or lack thereof. It could be possible however, contra Putnam, that Rust Belt citizens have actually turned to bowling as a way of reconnecting with their community, rather than disengaging from it.

Or (stepping back from the brink of Germanic socio-economic theory) this map could simply highlight the cultural geography of a leisure activity with strong associations to the geography of early to mid 20th century manufacturing centers. Unfortunately for us, however, Google Maps cannot tell us why people bowl or whether they are bowling alone [2]. So for now, we remain wondering whether bowling is indicative of a resurgence of community or growing individualism. Let along the more troubling question of how Wii bowling fits into this.

[1] Google Maps directories are drawn from a range of sources such as yellow page listings. This category is distinct from and excludes user generated placemarks that we use in other maps.

[2] Or at least not until the release of Google BowlCam which is now in beta testing.