PSL Is A Gambling Gateway
US Total Lottery Ticket Sales vs US Pumpkin Spice Product Sales
Lottery ticket sales and pumpkin spice sales rose together. Every $7 latte makes a Powerball ticket feel reasonable. By the third PSL of the season, you are buying scratch-offs at the drive-thru.
“There is no measurable difference, neurochemically, between sipping a pumpkin spice latte and scratching off a lottery ticket. The dopamine is identical.”
— Prof. Latte Megamillions, Behavioral Economist
A correlation, not a conclusion
What you are looking at is the trajectory of US Total Lottery Ticket Sales set against US Pumpkin Spice Product Sales. Over the years where both series exist, they happen to move in lockstep tightly enough to produce r ≈ 99% (positive). 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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