Lab #3

                I love eating frozen yogurt, but I cannot decide which frozen yogurt place I prefer, Pinkberry or Yogurtland. There are many different aspects of why I like Pinkberry: the different toppings and flavors, however Yogurtland offers more flavors and more topping and is “serve-yourself” and ”pay-by-the-once,” which is a nice feature. However, many times I wonder where the frozen yogurt places are located nearby and if I am going out of my way for one over the other. So I decided to make a map containing all the Pinkberries and Yogurtland’s in Los Angeles. I also added in some other popular frozen yogurt places that I have been to and enjoyed: Red Mango and Menchie.

                I created an excel file with the addresses of all the Pinkberry, Yogurtland, Menchie and Red Mango places I could find and converted it into a geodata base to put it in ArcMap. Then, I geocoded the addresses. I also added my addresses into the map. Since I live in two different places: Westwood, for when I’m going to class, and El Segundo, where I grew up and where my parents still live, I geocoded both addresses so I could see the frozen yogurt places around me. I created a 2 mile and 5 mile buffer around both addresses to see not only how many of the places are around the addresses, but also how close they actually are.

I came to a conclusion that there are more Pinkberries than Yogurtlands around where I live at both addresses. However, just because there are more Pinkberries around me does not mean that I am more inclined to go there over any other store. At my Westwood apartment, the Red Mango is closets, then the Yogurtland, and then the Pinkberry. Therefore I should want to go to Red Mango. However, at my house in El Segundo, the Pinkberry is the closets and should help make my decision whenever I cannot pick between Pinkberry and Yogurtland.

Answering my question by geocoding definitely made me able to better understand what I was looking at. Everyone has a mental map, but not all are very accurate. By selecting to put the frozen yogurt places on the map along with my address, made me focus on those points and I was not distracted by any unnecessary items that would be put on Google maps. It helped me answer my question because it was specific to what I was asking and very clear in representing the data.