If you're working at a standing desk in a minimalist shared office space or sipping any sort of organic matcha varietal that could increase your heart rate right now, you might want to sit down, because we've got some news for you.
… Ready?
According to a new survey, Denver is the fourth most pretentious city in the country. O.M.G.
We know, we know. Take some yoga breaths and jot down your feelings in your Moleskine, because your transcendental meditation therapist is going to want to burn them in a ceremony to cleanse your aura after the weight of this information sinks in.
This news flash comes from Café Valet, a prestigious company which makes coffee for hotel rooms, who conducted the first-ever study on U.S. city pretentiousness.
How did this hotel coffee company measure citywide pretension? By counting the number of independent coffee shops, yoga studios, art galleries and Whole Foods per capita, of course. The higher the concentration of these things, the more pretentious a city was rated. A low concentration of Walmart stores also added to a city's pretentiousness. Also figuring into the mix were Facebook Audience metrics, which determined that high numbers of people interested in philosophy, poetry, Moleskine notebooks, Sting and electric/hybrid cars contributed to a city's pompousness.
If only Café Valet had added a few extra measures of pretension like marijuana snobbery, quantity of beard barbershops, hand tattoos per citizen, vintage motorcycle ownership rates, and most importantly, the degree to which the city is affected by Smart Car tipping sprees to their metrics, we'd be #1 right now. God damn it, we'd be kings.
Naturally, San Francisco topped the list at the #1 most pretentious city in all the land. San Jose and San Diego claimed the silver and bronze, proving once and for all that there's nothing more highfalutin than a city with a "San" prefix whose historically Spanish or Latino population was run out by the white man.
"As the standard-bearers for the 'Regular Joe,' we fear for San Francisco's future. The notion that people are paying $100 for civet coffee to drink while wearing a woolen cap in the summertime is a problematic trend," said Andrew Barnett, who led the analysis for Café Valet, in a statement.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Birmingham, Alabama, was America's least-pretentious city, followed by Riverside, California and Detroit. Great, now we know where to go if we want a nice, humble American powdered coffee, seasonally appropriate clothing with many pockets, and a sedentary lifestyle that guarantees the only yoga we do will be corpse pose when we die of diabeetus.
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