You want to know what a modern global empire is? Think Starbucks. According to Wikipedia, they have 13,168 stores worldwide and are opening 7 new stores on a daily basis. I think that’s absolutely ridiculous.

About two years ago, I made a just-for-fun post in the private phpBB Teams forum in which I asked team members to lookup and find out how many Starbucks stores were in their area. Here in the SF Bay Area, there’s at least one Starbucks in every city. In fact, there are five different Starbucks stores within only a 2 mile radius of my home. One of them is a block and a half up the street. Across the street from AT&T Park in San Francisco, there literally are two Starbucks stores within three buildings of each other, on the same block. (Albeit one of them is a store inside a Safeway store, but the Safeway store does have a Starbucks sign on the window which is three buildings away from the standalone Starbucks store.) When a class from my school visited Chinatown two weeks ago, there were two full-blown Starbucks stores literally a block apart from each other across the street from the Chinatown entrance. And both were full to capacity. That just flabbergasted me.

So the challenge is for you to find out how many Starbucks stores are in your area? To determine this, enter your address into the Starbucks Store Locator, and to make sure we’re all on the same page, choose a search radius of 20 miles. The total number of stores will be shown on the bottom of the list. Post your result in the Comments section of this post.

I bet that you probably can’t beat my number unless you live in New York City or something. There are currently 217 Starbucks Stores within 20 miles of my house. Yeah. THAT’S a lot of caffeine.

Can you beat my 217? (Other friends of mine who live in San Mateo don’t count!) Hie thee hence to the Store Locator, and then share your results in the Comments section!

Tags: challenge, craziness, empire, locator, Starbucks, stores