[samfriedman]

I hope your severity doesn't get your comment downvoted, because I was hoping there'd be some discussion on that chart.

It's trying to do a lot of things with ranking within a metric and comparing across metrics. A big problem I see is that the intervals aren't equal even for metrics with the same units. If I want to compare how far apart Family Dollar and Dollar General are in terms of customer unemployment or bachelors' percentage, well graphically it's pretty much useless. There's more spatial difference across the entire Unemployed line than there is between a (presumably) equal distance in the Bachelor's line.

Even if it's only designed to allow me to rank these stores across numerous metrics, the alignment of the legend with the first row of colored points confused me for a minute: I was reading the legend not as referring to color, but to column.

I'd be curious to see what Kaiser Fung at Junk Charts [0] has to say about it.

[0] http://junkcharts.typepad.com/