US pet food total market sales

It is a curious fact, and one that says something rather unflattering about the human brain's ability to distinguish between causation and mere chronological proximity, that the amount of money Americans spent on pet food between 2010 and 2022 moved almost perfectly in step with the number of public electric vehicle charging stations we bothered to install. One goes up, the other goes up. One pauses, the other pauses. It is as if Fluffy's kibble consumption was somehow summoning Tesla charging infrastructure into existence.

There is something rather comforting about this, actually, in the way it reveals that massive human systems often move together without the faintest idea they are holding hands. Pet food and EV charging stations were never supposed to be in conversation. Yet here they are, locked in a 0.993 correlation that means almost nothing and yet tells us something true about how economic growth distributes itself across seemingly unrelated categories when nobody is paying attention.

We are, it seems, creatures who organize our behavior in larger patterns than we realize, and we rarely notice these patterns unless someone bothers to graph two completely unrelated things and stare at them long enough. The real question is not why pet food sales and charging stations rise together, but whether we might be missing something equally strange happening right now, silently, in the background of our current decisions. We almost certainly are.