Starbucks stores worldwide

For every Starbucks that opened somewhere in the world between 2010 and 2022, American broiler chickens marched forward in aggregate production with quiet, statistically significant loyalty, the two series correlating at 0.9665. One imagines the Starbucks expansion team and the US poultry industry sharing a whiteboard, their growth projections identical, neither able to explain why. The chickens are not buying lattes. The lattes are not made of chicken. And yet here we are, staring at a graph that strongly implies they are part of the same plan.

Starbucks grew from roughly 16,000 stores in 2010 to over 35,000 by 2022, driven by international expansion particularly in China, drive-through buildout in the US, and post-pandemic recovery. US broiler chicken production grew from approximately 37 billion pounds to over 45 billion pounds over the same period, driven by population growth, the shift from beef to poultry for cost and health reasons, and fast food demand. Both are expressions of global consumer economy expansion—Starbucks tracking premium beverage demand, chicken production tracking protein demand—growing for independent but contemporaneous reasons.

A growing global consumer economy lifts both artisanal beverages and commodity proteins at the same time. The correlation is real in the shallow sense that both measure economic expansion; it is meaningless in every other sense.