People who own a standalone GPS

As Americans have discarded their standalone GPS devices with the quiet efficiency of a nation that has moved on, they have spent more money eating pizza in restaurants, a correlation that suggests either that people who can no longer navigate are wandering into pizza shops by accident or that the smartphone that killed the GPS also made it easier to find the nearest Domino's. The correlation is -0.960 across sixteen years, which means these two trends are moving in almost perfectly opposite directions, like a compass needle spinning away from true north and toward pepperoni.

GPS device ownership declined as smartphones made dedicated navigation hardware obsolete, falling from about 30 percent of households to under 10 percent by 2022. Pizza restaurant spending grew from roughly 38 billion to over 60 billion during the same period, driven by delivery apps (which require the same smartphone that killed the GPS), population growth, and the expansion of fast-casual pizza chains. There is a thread connecting these trends that is not quite causal but not quite coincidental either: the smartphone that replaced the GPS also created the food delivery infrastructure that boosted pizza spending. Uber Eats, DoorDash, and their competitors all depend on the same GPS technology that Garmin used to sell in a box.

Sixteen years of GPS devices declining and pizza spending rising is a story about a single device—the smartphone—replacing one industry while fueling another. The GPS shrank into an app, the pizza arrived at your door, and the correlation between the two is the biography of a pocket computer that changed everything it touched. The destination was always pizza.