Today’s quick clip comes from Stephen Von Worley at datapointed.net. Wanna get at least 100 miles away from McDonalds? What do you know about Nevada?
Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s!
As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.
Grist sums this part up pretty nicely:
To get genuinely out of McRange, you need to travel to the desert near the Nevada-Oregon border, where it is possible to be 110 miles from a McDonald’s. Von Worley traveled out there to show the world the vast loneliness of being two hours from a Big Mac. Kinda makes you want to schedule a pilgrimage, doesn’t it?
So…. who wants to road trip?
Kidding!
(Sorta.)
Thoughts?
7 comments
This is crazy! I need to move out West … lol
I can’t help but to shake my head at how true this is, especially along the east coast (I-95). But you have to admit that sometimes, they come in handy. I actually ended up going to a McDonald’s last night. The visit was necessary. Relax, I only had to go potty. 🙂 I ran out of there so fast because the smell of the food was making me sick to my stomach.
Yes, McDonalds is great for clean, relatively safe toilets.
Montpelier, VT is the only state capitol without a McDonald’s.
Actually this proves something I heard a long time ago. Someone wrote that people think McD’s is only in the restaurant business but their REAL business was real estate. They make a HUGE deal about where they will place those babies and it’s always on or near prime real estate. I’d love to know how big their real estate department is.
McDonalds doesn’t make much on food, but real estate is, by far, their greatest revenue generator. Fast Food Nation goes SUPER DEEP into all of this. They survey suburban and freeway areas in helicopters to gauge where to put one next, and (if I remember correctly) rent the space to a franchisee… if that franchisee can’t keep up w/their obligations they simply kick them out and put another one in.
I mean, McDonalds has made LOTS of millionaires in this country, but dang…. 🙁
(I TOTALLY started to write about this in the blog post and, for some reason, decided against it. I wish I hadn’t.)
Aint this the truth of the matter, lol its all about will power and mc donalds will continue to grow… we just have to grow our minds bigger
This is one of the reasons why it’s hard to get young folk to enjoy a decent home cooked meal. In Detroit, we have too many of them, almost one every 3 or 4 blocks, and my conservative estimation. Depressing 🙁
Comments are closed.