Escape room locations in the US

From 2014 to 2022, the United States simultaneously opened more escape rooms and produced more broiler chickens, hitting a correlation of 0.9736 that appears to describe two industries with nothing in common except a shared enthusiasm for captivity. One confines people voluntarily for entertainment; the other confines chickens involuntarily for protein. The philosophical distinction is meaningful. The statistical distinction is not.

The US escape room industry grew from near-zero in 2014 to over 2,300 locations by 2019 before pandemic disruptions, then recovered, tracking the explosive global spread of the format from its origins in Japan and Hungary. US broiler chicken production grew steadily from around 50 billion pounds in 2014 to over 55 billion pounds by 2022, driven by demand growth, export expansion, and the continued consumer shift toward poultry as a cheaper protein source. Both are fundamentally growth stories over a period of general economic expansion — one a new leisure category, one a mature agricultural commodity doing what mature agricultural commodities do when the economy grows.

Everything grows during economic expansions, which means everything correlates with everything else during those periods. The correlation coefficient is, in part, a measure of how long the good times lasted.