Spam canned meat sales

It is a curious fact, and one that the universe seems to find hilarious, that between 2010 and 2022 the number of cans of Spam sold in America moved almost perfectly in sync with the number of people killed while riding bicycles. One might as well correlate the sales of rubber ducks with international cricket scores and expect the same 0.923 coefficient of destiny. Which raises the question: what kind of cosmic accountant decides that these two things—preserved pork product and cyclist mortality—should be bedfellows.

The answer, disappointingly, is probably just America itself getting slightly bigger and slightly busier. Population growth, suburban sprawl, and the rise of both cycling culture and convenience-food dependence all happened together during those years; add in improved (or at least more consistent) hospital reporting of bicycle fatalities, and you have a pair of trends that climb like synchronized swimmers without knowing anything about each other. Consider that Spam sales increased by roughly 18% over the period while cyclist deaths rose by a similar percentage—both moving at the pace of a nation of about 330 million people gradually making different choices about what to eat and how to get around.

This is what happens when you let humans loose with enough data: we find conspiracies in coincidence, patterns in the random drift of 13 points on a graph. The Spam-bicycle correlation tells us nothing except that correlation is hilariously common when you're not paying attention to what you're actually measuring. Perhaps that's worth remembering next time someone swears they've found proof of something important. Two entirely unrelated things rose together. So.