SlowpokeBlog

[UPDATE: I received an e-mail from Bert Sperling explaining that the number of Starbucks was not used in the Best Cities ranking; he claims it's more of a "fun fact" -- an affluence indicator of sorts -- that appears on the website where you can compare cities. I think they could make it clearer that it was not a variable in their published study. Also, this explanation doesn't exactly jibe with the language on the site, which reads like a straightforward advertisement for Starbucks. Moreover, it completely ignores the destructive power of Starbucks over local businesses, and the aesthetic degradation of our towns and cities.]

This is really interesting. A report came out recently, ranking my town of Charlottesville, VA the number one place to live in the country (above Honolulu, even!). Nothing unusual there -- Charlottesville is consistently rated highly in these sorts of studies. But get this: one of the variables in the study was the number of Starbucks in the city, as in the more Starbucks, the better. Sperling's Best Places website (the source of the rankings) explains:

To growing number of people, Starbucks means fresh-brewed premium coffee at affordable prices. This is the number of Starbucks locations in a city, and if there are none, then the number of miles to the nearest city with one or more.

Smells like product placement, if you ask me. This wouldn't necessarily be a big deal, except this particular ranking is being promulgated in a new book, Cities Ranked and Rated, which is receiving all kinds of press coverage. Cities are taking the rankings very seriously, as a book like this can have a major impact on local economies. In protest, I sent them this e-mail:

I can't believe you are using the number of Starbucks as a positive factor in your rankings. So a town where all the local coffee shops have been supplanted by a national chain are the best towns? If you must use Starbucks as a factor, it seems to me it would be a negative -- i.e., the town is losing its unique character. Your little blurb about Starbucks, by the way, reeks of product placement. Tacky.

You can see this all for yourself on their city comparison pages.

Ironically, they got the number of Starbucks in Charlottesville wrong. They say we have just one, when we actually have at least four. I guess that makes us an even better city than they thought!