Surf on over to the Weather Sealed blog for Stephen Von Worley's post on the Burger wars in America (H/T Daily Dish).
Stephen created the picture below examining the saturation of McDonald's restaurants in relation to competitor restaurants:
How Stephen created the plot:
...each individual restaurant location has equal power. The entity that controls each point casts the most aggregate burger force upon it, as calculated by the inverse-square law – kind of like a chart outlining the gravitational wells of galactic star clusters, but in an alternate, fast food universe.In short, all the black areas of the map are controlled by McDonald's. But what is that blue patch over my home state of Texas?
By far, the largest pocket of resistance is Sonic Drive-In’s south-central stronghold: more than 900 restaurants packed into the state of Texas alone.
Ah, the joys of living in Sonic country!My favorite meal: Large vanilla coke with a chili cheese coney dog...
It needs a white background so you can see where the US starts/stops...or maybe, McDonald control our oceans, too? Shudder.
I don't want to knock McD too hard. For this reason.
Two summers ago my family and I were in Germany. And after a long day of battling the language barrier and chronically not getting what we wanted for lunch or dinner one day we rolled into the Leipzig train station, tried, thirsty and hungry. And there it was! The Golden Arches! I never enjoyed a meal as much as I enjoyed that one. Coke! With ice! And free refills! A burger and fries!
It was heaven.
It is for that reason that I can only enjoy McDonald's when traveling abroad. It is a taste of America that for me can only be enjoyed after an absence of everything familiar to home.