Pumpkin Spice Killed The Wiener Dog
AKC Dachshund Registrations vs US Pumpkin Spice Product Sales
As pumpkin spice sales soared, dachshund registrations cratered. The fall aesthetic does not include short legs. Sausage-dog erasure is real, and it tastes like nutmeg.
“Every PSL drinker, when polled, prefers a golden retriever in a flannel sweater. The dachshund never stood a chance.”
— Dr. Latte Frankfurter, Canine Sociologist
A correlation, not a conclusion
What you are looking at is the trajectory of AKC Dachshund Registrations set against US Pumpkin Spice Product Sales. Over the years where both series exist, they happen to move inversely tightly enough to produce r ≈ 98% (negative). That number sounds impressive. It is also entirely meaningless without a hypothesis.
Two unrelated trends can correlate strongly when they share an underlying driver — economic growth, technology adoption, demographic change — or when the dataset is small enough for noise to look like a signal. The only thing this chart proves is that "correlation does not imply causation" remains the most-ignored sentence in science.
Treat it as a meme with a citation. Source data is from public, reputable datasets; the implied story is not.
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