Chicago Loves its Coffee Chains

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Sep 19, 2011 7:30PM

The National Coffee Association recently conducted a survey that showed (duh!) that coffee consumption is up.

Online website Bundle took that a step further and focused on cities where coffee consumption at chains such as Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, Peet's and others has increased to determine which towns are the most caffeinated in America.

Chicago places at the top of Bundle's survey. Here's how they came to that conclusion.

Bundle data comes from the U.S. government, from 20 million anonymous and aggregated spending transactions from Visa and Mastercard holders, and third party data providers. Coffee shop spending was determined by looking at transactions at the following coffee shops during the second quarter of 2011: Dunkin' Donuts, Blue State Coffee, Caribou Coffee, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Cuppy's Coffee, Gimme Coffee, It's a Grind Coffee House, Jittery Joe's, Lavazza, Peet's Coffee and Tea, PJ's Coffee, Port City Java, Seattle's Best Coffee, Starbucks, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Tully's Coffee. The data was normalized so the average U.S. city would be at 1.0 — anything beyond that would show spending that's greater than the national average. Cities included are in the top 100 in the U.S. by population. Starbucks per 10,000 people data from StateMaster.

We're kind of surprised there are 0.323 per 10,000 people in Illinois. That's a "billions and billions served" philosophy in action right there.