The State With The Most Starbucks Locations Isn't Washington

Chain restaurants and cafes are known for sprawling across the United States and beyond, but every one of them had to start somewhere. While some restaurants, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, are synonymous with their home state, others have grown so much in different territories that their hometowns have become totally eclipsed. Somewhere between these two extremes falls Starbucks, a coffee shop chain with its flagship store in Seattle. However, Starbucks has become such a massive chain that Washington is no longer home to most Starbucks locations.

As is increasingly becoming the case for countless fast food chains, California tops the list. With 2,818 Starbucks within the state's 163,696 square miles of land,   there is one store for every 14,020 people. In fact, when it comes to states that house the most Starbucks locations across the country, Washington isn't even within the top three; both Texas, which has 1,289 locations, and Florida, which has 818, have more than Washington's 669 Starbucks restaurants.

While Starbucks having far more locations in California than in Washington state would've come as a shock a few decades ago, the success of the second-largest restaurant chain on Earth in recent years truly cannot be understated. Since its founding in 1971, the chain was intrinsically Washington for decades. Through its mass expansion, the Seattle-based brand has been able to highlight and promote its hometown's unique coffeehouse culture to the mainstream in a way that those outside of the Pacific Northwest are unlikely to realize.

Plus, while the number of Washington Starbucks locations might seem low, that metric doesn't tell the whole story. In fact, when taking population into account, Washington still has a pretty tight grip on the number of Starbucks locations per capita. In fact, with one Starbucks for every 11,380 people in the state, Washington beats out every other state — including California — in Starbucks' top ten by a pretty comfortable margin.