Contemplate This
August 30, 2009

Apparently, during a recession people stay put. They don't travel across the country for a job, and they don't pack up their bank accounts and move to wonderful places like Santa Barbara to live. On what small amount of data did we make these broad general conclusions? On the fact that the dedicated staff of edhat.com had trouble finding any out-of-state license plates to tally for our guess-the-most-prevalent-out-of-sate-license-plate contest.

In fact, we spent two days, in more than 20 parking lots to come up with only a Delaware sized sample of plates for our periodic look into the migratory trends of people coming to Santa Barbara. Since we were focusing on grocery stores, our sample mostly included people who live here, and not so many tourists.

We looked at the rear end of 2,720 cars. It was a bumper crop of locals. 98.75% of the cars we saw were from the Golden State. The other 1.25% of the cars were mostly from neighboring states. Arizona was number one (17%), Nevada was number two (15%), and Texas was number three (12%). The rest were from as far away as Hawaii, Maine, and Florida.

In a previous Edhat study, Colorado was the big winner. This time, we only saw one car from there. We leave the interpretation of that trend up to you.

For this week's contest, only one Edhat subscriber successfully named the top three license plate trifecta. Antandrus wins an Edhat t-shirt, available for pick-up at Santa Barbara Arts in La Arcada, one of the most local places in town.

2004 - Colorado, Arizona, Oregon

2005 - Tie between Arizona and Nevada

2006 - Arizona, Nevada, Texas

2007- Four way tie - Idaho, Illinois, Nevada, and Ohio.

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