This Map Makes It Easy To Avoid Starbucks

Walk down almost any city street looking for a dose of caffeine and you'll see it: The green and white Starbucks mascot, a literal siren beckoning us through the door. She's seemingly everywhere, from downtown to the suburbs to each highway turnoff. Starbucks is so big that it can seem like the only place to grab a coffee anymore.

But if you're looking to step outside the Starbucks box, there's hope. An industrious Reddit user has taken it upon themself to create a U.S. map highlighting any and all coffee shops that aren't Starbucks, and just a few days since its launch it already has nearly 64,000 listings. If you're hoping to support a local coffee shop, this map will help you anywhere you go.

Nahbucks is the brainchild of user wise_genesis, who announced the map on Reddit less than a week ago. While the map displays those 64,000 non-Starbucks coffee houses using green dots overlaid on an OpenStreetMap display, it also displays 18,670 Starbucks locations using black dots (ostensibly so you can avoid them if you wish to).

Wise_genesis clarifies that the Starbucks count is higher than the amount of actual Starbucks locations, because it includes "all the places that serve Starbucks coffee. Any coffee shop with Starbucks in the name or other business info, essentially." Many hotels, for example, have generic cafes that brew Starbucks.

In the Reddit thread, wise_genesis says that the site isn't without its bugs. If you look carefully on the Nahbucks map and scroll, say, to the Atlantic Ocean, you might find some errant cafes located in what appears to be the middle of the sea. Wise_genesis acknowledges this by writing in a comment response, "I scraped all of Google Maps for USA data. For some reason a few random ones popped up. Thanks for the heads up though."

And in another comment regarding these rogue middle-of-nowhere coffee shops, wise_genesis surmises that "I actually think they are phantom Google Business profiles. People create them and put weird coordinates so they don't get found."

Aside from that, the map seems pretty accurate, at least accounting for what's near me. Other Reddit users are into the concept of Nahbucks, though some of them are lobbying for Dunkin' locations to also be offset from this map.

This is far from wise_genesis' first project that has caught our eye. Back in February of this year, the internet was briefly captivated by McCheapest, a website that tracks the price of a Big Mac at every McDonald's location in the country. That was the brainchild of wise_genesis too, aka Sacha Fournier, who wrote an informative Twitter thread about why and how he compiled the McCheapest map. Just a few weeks later, he followed up McCheapest with Eggspensive, a map tracking the price of a carton of eggs nationwide.

As much brand loyalty as customers have for Starbucks, there are still many people out there who would rather keep their eyes open for a locally owned cafe, and this map helps them do it. Enjoy your Frappuccino-free experience.