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The Picard Maneuver @lemmy.world

8mo ago

Bars vs Grocery Stores in the United States

54 comments

I think this is a bad map. No data, no sourcing, no analysis, nothing. It’s just clickbaity nonsense. Those aren’t even counties it’s just cutting the country up into random squares cause lord knows how forked the map projection is.
- Those aren’t even counties it’s just cutting the country up into random squares
  hey, if it works for voting
  
  "Squares".
  
  Yeah but it doesn’t so…

Don't know why, but I was expecting a bar chart
- It's a chart about bars, hence a 'bar chart.'
  
  I didn’t need this

That tracks
- Between the lead pipes and alcohol, the upper Midwest seems to weed out the thinkers.

When there's nothing else to do, people drink. I went to college at the top of Michigan's upper peninsula, and there was a running joke at my school, that there were only two ways out: You either drop out, or you graduate an alcoholic
- Why not both? One guy at school had to drop out because his liver was so damaged because of drinking.
- But there's red dots at a lot of the big cities (edit: at least in the South). That's the opposite of "nothing else to do."
  
  You ever been in a big city in the South? They aren't the densely packed walkable and/or public transportation heavy big towns like New York or Chicago. The old parts of town that were designed before cars now have narrow densely trafficked streets paved through them with inadequate parking and no real "park here and take public transport in," nearly none of them have commuter rail, some might have bus services. The majority of the city is just heavy suburbs, miles upon miles of retail strip malls and tract housing.
  Even when you compare places like Greensboro to places like Sanford, you start going "Well there's more brewpubs...which are bars. There's more restaurants...that serve alchohol. There's a comedy club...that serves alcohol. Greensboro is Sanford if Sanford had a functioning mall and a minor league baseball team. If you live there, at 6 pm on a given Thursday you can stay home or you can go out to a bar and that's about it.

There are way too many of these US dots outside of the US for my liking.

Anything you wanna talk about Wisconsin?
- Don't worry, Wisconsin's top lobbying organization by dollars spent will speak to you for the state populace

If you're a drinker you know where the liquor store is. If you drink a lot you know what time it closes. If you drink too much you know what time it opens.

Interesting. A lot of the red spots in CO, at least, are places with not many people, so they only have one grocery store. If there are 2 bars, they'd meet the criteria. The center left spot looks like it's where a lot of the ski towns are - small permanent populations (and getting smaller thanks to most of the housing stock being on airbnb), lots of tourists. Of course there would be more bars, and probably restaurants.
The giant red swaths are uh...a little more concerning.
- I grew up in central Wisconsin, can confirm there are more bars than grocery stores lol

I would think most places would have more bars than grocery stores. Even a pretty big town usually only needs what, 5 or 6 grocery stores for a population of under 100,000? And they can be more distant. People like bars to be near them and they generally don't have the capacity of a grocery store, so you need more of them. Overhead is much lower too, obviously.
- 6 grocery stores for 100'000 people? here in sweden that's not enough grocery stores for 50k!
  with 100k people i'd expect at least 20 stores, if not more.
  
  in my experience, the grocery stores in sweden tend to be considerably smaller than the grocery stores in the united states. pretty much every grocery store in the US is larger than an ica maxi. there needs to be room for all 20 flavors of toothpaste and all 40 flavors of oreos.
  
  Unless you're counting shit like Dollar General, not even close to that many in the U.S.
  I don't even know how they would survive with that low number of customers. Why would you even need 20?
- You must mean grocery stores in us sense (i. e. gigantic)
  
  This is for shops in a 75k city in my country. I guess there are far more that are not shown at this zoom.
  
  I do, but then it’s a map of the U.S.
- I thought we wanted walkable cities with grocery stores on every corner???
  
  What we may want what what the reality is are two very different things.

Virginia doesn't have bars. They have restaurants that may have a bar in them. Even breweries with tap rooms have minimum food sales requirements.
- California has a similar law in that any establishment that serves booze also has to serve food to some degree
- I live in a small town in Wisconsin. The bars happen to also be the best restaurants. Doesn't make them not bars if they serve food
- That's kinda sad.
  
  …why?
  
  It's not a difficult bar (heh) to clear. Keep a stock of frozen pizzas on hand, have a cheap countertop pizza oven, bam, food requirement satisfied.

Hey alcohol warms yer innards mates

the fuck is going on in upstate new york? wisconsin checks out, but why is upstate NY an isolated hot spot? it's not like they drink more than PA or VT
- A lot of people from the city have second homes there, vacation spots. Maybe that can explain it?
- I'm currently in Wisconsin and am greatly pleased with the bar offerings....my family is from Buffalo...I understand

Wisconsin, are you okay?

This ratio would be trivial to represent as a gradient.

how much of that big red blob in the middle is actually owned by the mafia
- My wife worked with someone related to the owner of Al Capone's favorite bar to lie low in when things got too hot in Chicago. She was told to namedrop her relative if she's ever in Vegas and when she finally did she immediately got the ultra-VIP treatment

54 comments