EXPLORING PHILADELPHIA'S CAFFEINE SCENE
INTRODUCTION
There's no better place to meet a date, hang out with friends, or build a dozen slide decks by an impossible deadline that your manager set right before going on vacation than a cafe. And there's no better way to examine Philadelphia's cafe scene than with data. So without further ado - let's dive in.
DATA
Data for this project was scraped from Yelp and workfrom.co with webscraper.io. Tableau Prep was utilized to clean the dataset and join the results of both scrapes together: subsequently, Geocodio was used to transform addresses into lat-long coordinates. All visualizations were rendered in Tableau.
ASSUMPTIONS
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🚫⛓️ (Starbucks, Saxby's, etc.)
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A chain is defined as "more than 1 cafe of the same name in Philadelphia"
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Discover new places!
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Incoming residents will prefer to live in Center City, around the City Hall area
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The cost of traveling a mile is roughly equivalent to [0.92 / mile] + [0.32 / minute x 4 minutes / mile] = $2.2
OBJECTIVE
To determine the optimal Philadelphia cafe(s) on the dimensions of general quality, workability, and price.
A. OVERVIEW
Cafes with higher ratings and more reviews demonstrate both quality and consistency: traits that are well-valued in any decision heuristic. From the above chart, we see that the three most-ideal cafes in this regard are Gran Caffe L'Aquila, Tria Cafe Rittenhouse, and Cafe La Maude.
However, simply coding by rating ignores many factors. For example, the highest-rated cafes may be the most expensive, deterring price-sensitive consumers. Or they may simply not be good for working - they may have poor Internet access or be too-crowded to facilitate productivity. Evidently, further analysis is needed.
B. QUALITY V. WORKABILITY
Workability
Workability, as it applies to the cafes of Philadelphia, will be generally defined as the degree to which a particular cafe is an effective workspace (not to be confused with rating, which is simply a measure of a cafe's general quality). The workability rating we will examine is a function of the default data (ambience rating, Wi-Fi speed) provided by workfrom.co, a site that identifies some of the top spots to do work in Philadelphia.
workability = ambience_rating + wifi_speed / max(wifi_speed)
Price
Yelp offers limited price data in the form of a certain number of $ symbols. This is a good benchmark for roughly estimating the average price of an order ($ = 5, $$ = 15, $$$ = 25), but not very interesting data-wise.
However, one expense Yelp does not consider that actually plays a major factor in the decision-making process regarding culinary destinations (and by extension cafes) is cost of travel. Hence, we elect to scale price based on distance from the area of Philadelphia City Hall as per our initial assumptions.
scaled_price = distance_in_miles x price_per_mile + benchmark_price
This allows us much more freedom when it comes to comparing cafes, as illustrated below.
Cafes in the upper-right quadrant of both charts are above average in quality / workability respectively. If you're just looking to grab some good coffee with a friend, J'aime French Bakery or Dolce & Caffe are probably a good bet: however, if you're looking to crank out a slide deck before that deadline, maybe consider Capital One Cafe, Parliament Coffee, or Bodhi Coffee. If you're a little more price-insensitive, Vault + Vine boasts a perfect workability score, claiming a 4.0 on the ambience rating as well as a ridiculous 107-megabyte Wi-Fi speed.
C. SYNTHESIS
While general quality and workability are both important, we are also interested in the synthesis of the two - in other words, which Philadelphia cafes have the best value-for-money with regards to both overall quality and workability? To answer this question, we create two further metrics:
quality_per_dollar = rating / scaled_price
workability_per_dollar = workability / scaled_price
This serves to further clarify the visualization:
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J'aime French Bakery, Parliament Coffee, and Greenstreet Coffee Co. dominate Philadelphia cafes in terms of quality.
Note that this viz only includes the top ~20 cafes with regards to this metric.
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On the other hand, Parliament Coffee, Capital One Cafe, and Rally dominate Philadelphia cafes in terms of workability.
Now that we have a more fleshed-out understanding of both attributes, we aim to examine their intersection, by constructing a new viz comparing Quality per Dollar to Workability per Dollar.
From this, we see that Parliament Coffee and Capital One Cafe are the two cafes to watch out for, being significantly above-average in both Quality per Dollar and Workability per Dollar. Rally is a close third. For more consistent experiences (represented by larger numbers of reviews), Menagerie Coffee is a solid option.
D. CONCLUSION
The cafe market in Philadelphia is quite diverse in terms of both quality and workability. That being said, though, there are still a few standout players in this space. A table summarizing our findings can be found below (arranged in order of most-recently-mentioned).
E. OUTTAKES
Working late? Craving boba? Downloading the Library of Congress?
