Where would you open a Chipotle?
Maps · R leaflet · maps · R
In our family Chipotle burritos are as good as cash (maybe even better than cash). Unfortunately, the closest place I can capitalize on this easy financial return is over 30 minutes away! This got me thinking, where would I open a Chipotle? Once I got beyond the obvious answer of in our local country store, I thought how great would it have been to have a Chipotle by Notre Dame (where I went to grad school). This would have greatly contributed to my procrastination efforts and my Chipotle would have thousands of customers within an easy walk. So I used the google machine to see if this market was still available, and turns out someone beat me to it. This crushing realization felt so terrible (imagine they forgot to put guac on your burrito) that I decided I couldn’t go through it again. I had to know where all the Chipotles are—and more importantly where they are not!
This led me to create the “Where would you open a Chipotle?” project on DataCamp. DataCamp’s partner organization Thinknum, an alternative data provider focused on generating insights off the web, provided me with great data on the location of every Chipotle in the US. My project on DataCamp leverages the fantastic leaflet package in R to explore the geographic distribution of Chipotles, including point maps, choropleth maps, Voronoi polygons, etc. But the bottom line is that there is a state in the US that does not have a Chipotle! Don’t believe it? I too was skeptical, but the story checks out.
How can we let there be “Where would you open a Chipotle?” project on DataCamp. In this Project, you’ll explore real data on every Chipotle to identify this state. Then you’ll scout out the next Chipotle location using interactive maps and external data to compare proposed locations on several important factors, such as proximity to current Chipotle locations, the distribution of the state’s population, and the distance from interstates and tourist attractions.
I owe a big thank you to David Venturi, Ramnath Vaidyanathan, and Erin LaBrecque. With their help, I learned how to use Jupyter Notebooks and now you too can use R to make interactive maps (like the one below) inside a Jupyter Notebook.
