Starbucks as an economic indicator

By OWEN MORRIS

Over at Slate, resident business expert Daniel Gross has an interesting article that, in essence, makes a correlation between the state of a country’s banking crisis and how invasive Starbucks has become there. For instance, London and Spain are being hit extremely hard by the financial crisis and they both have high densities of Starbucks.

It’s an article straight out of Thomas Friedman’s theories (Gross references Friedman’s Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention) and while it may work for international banking, it got me wondering if the theory would also hold up a little closer to home.