McAmerica

A map of every McDonald's in the United States has been making its way around the blogosphere after it was posted on Reddit and then picked up by the aggregators at HuffPo. For your review:

While the image is getting some attention now, it was actually created in 2009 by artist and scientist Stephen Von Worley, whose blog Data Pointed offers a wealth of data visualization research (be warned, it's quite the time waster).

In his post about McDonald's, Worley pinpoints areas where the company is ubiquitous, which turn out to be everywhere but the desert:

As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota.

Worley has even located "The McFarthest Spot" - the place in the Lower 48 states that's furthest from the nearest McDonald's. Currently that location is in the high desert of northwestern Nevada, and he's even made a trip there to mark the spot with McDonald french fries (which, despite what employees at your local chain might tell you, aren't vegan: they're coated in beef extract).

Looking at this data map, it should come as no surprise that McDonald's Corporation's 2010 revenues totaled $24.1 billion. Still, while the company's sales rose in the latest quarter, they fell short of expectations; the company also had to raise prices recently due to a spike in commodity costs.

But clearly McDonald's isn't going anywhere, and now that the company is opening stores in China (it hopes to have 2,000 locations there by the end of 2013), it's only a matter of time before the whole world is lit up by the golden arches.