Google Map Showing Starbucks Closures

Friday, July 18, 2008

Starbucks Closures Map
screenshot of starbucks closures map
Starbucks announced on July 1st that they will close approximately 600 company-operated stores in the US. The search terms 'Starbucks closures' has been top of the Google Trends list for most of today so it appears to be a topic that has captured the imagination of the American public.

Starbucks has released a pdf file of the 600 stores to be closed. I thought that it would be more useful to view the 600 stores on a Google Map so I produced this Starbucks Closures Map.

I geo-coded the stores using the brilliant Batch Geocode and then saved the results into Google Spreadsheets. I then used the Google Spreadsheets Map Wizard to build the Google Map. The whole process took about 30 minutes.

Update

Slate
have created a collaborative Starbucks Google Map. They want Starbucks lovers to share their stories about the stores that are closing. The map is open for anybody to add their thoughts and feelings. You can even add photos or videos of the store if you have them.

This is exactly the kind of interesting collaborative project that Google MyMaps was developed for. The Slate map may even be more accurate in geo-tagging the closing Starbucks than my map (check the comments below).

5 Comments:

At 4:21 PM, Blogger Virender Ajmani said...

Nice job Keir. Those markers load up real quick. Great!!

 
At 9:55 AM, Anonymous jared said...

did you error check those geocodes? Some are relegated to guesswork by zip code.

 
At 11:39 AM, Blogger Keir Clarke said...

I'm not sure how accurate the geo-coding is. I did a bit of an check to see that they were on the right road - which seemed to be OK. I'm sure many could be inaccurate on the street number.

I've only done geo-coding in the UK before and geo-coding from the post-code often leads to placemarks being some distance off. I've heard that geo-coding from zip codes is more accurate - but I don't know.

 
At 12:41 AM, Blogger Luke (Lakeyboy) said...

Have you thought of adding the 61 Australian stores closing to your list? Would give a good way of viewing all the "hitspots". Thanks. The Aussie closure PDF is here: http://www.starbucks.com/australia/closures.pdf

 
At 6:26 AM, Blogger Keir Clarke said...

Luke,

Thanks for the suggestion. I've added the Aus Starbucks from the PDF - I'm not sure about the geo-coding though as the when I cut and pasted from the pdf every 10th (or so) letter seemed to go missing.

 

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home

Archives