When you order pizza for delivery, you’re usually thinking about one thing: how insanely hungry you are, and how fine a gooey piece of cheesy, tomatoey heaven will taste in your mouth. Almost every time, your number one concern is that the delivery person gets to your house as fast as possible, before your stomach burns a hole in itself and your taste buds shrivel up!
This is the premise behind statistician Nathan Yau’s Pizza Place Geography map at FlowingData. When Yau orders pizza, he wants it as soon as possible and therefore usually orders from the pizza joint closest to him, wherever he is at the time. To give people a better idea of which pizza place might give them the speediest delivery, Yau created a map that indicates the dominant pizza chain in every location in the U.S. Using information sourced from AggData, Yau determined the closest pizza places within a 10-mile radius of locations across the country.
As you can see, from a national perspective Pizza Hut (shown in red) tends to be the chain closest to most people’s front doors, while Domino’s (shown in the darkest blue) appears fairly dominant in the northeast. Godfather’s, headquartered in Nebraska, is most prevalent in the midwest; you are very likely to come across Little Caesar’s in California and Michigan (after all, the chain’s first location was in Garden City, Michigan, according to Yau); Papa Murphy’s is most prevalent in areas close to its original location in Washington; and Papa John’s, which started in Kentucky, is very popular in the east central area. Though there are 557 Chuck E. Cheese’s locations in the U.S, none of them appear very centrally located compared to other chains.
Which pizza place dominates your neck of the woods?
via Popular Science
