For whatever reason, the blog post of mine with the biggest number of hits is a post from last January regarding the demographic differences between McDonald’s and Starbucks. Referencing a Time article, it was one of those posts I just kinda spit out without really thinking too much about it. Little did I know.
Anyway, now thanks to Business Week, we’re ready for round 2 in this fast food battle royale. And this time, the numbers are a little different.
Pew Research Center conducted a national survey, asking adults if they would prefer to live in a place with more McDonald’s or more Starbucks locations, and McDonald’s came out ahead, 43% to 35% overall.
That McDonald’s, with it’s cheap dollar menu and value meals, would trump premium coffeeshop Starbucks during a recession is no surprise. But what did surprise me was how the Pew results differed from Time’s.
Time’s analysis of Hitwise data showed that the Starbucks.com website tended to attract more females than the McDonald’s site and that their visitors tended to be in the 35-to-44-year-old range. The McDonald’s website, on the other hand, tended to attract younger visitors in the 18-to-34-year-old range.
Pew’s survey, however, showed that both men and women prefer McDonald’s to Starbucks (46% to 30% for men, and 41% to 40% for women, respectively) and that it was actually the younger crowd that preferred Starbucks (18-to-29-year-olds), rather than the 30- and 40-year-olds.
Now of course, it’s important to remember that the Time results were based on the demographics of visitors to the two companies’ websites, which is not necessarily an accurate representation of the preferences of in-store visitors. But if the Hitwise numbers are accurate, then that would seem to signal a pretty big shift in a year’s time away from Starbucks and towards McDonald’s, a shift that can be seen by comparing the companies’ stock performance over the last 12 months.
(Click to enlarge.)
A shift like that makes sense, really. Who are the ones most affected by the downturn in the economy? Families and older adults. And when money is tight, which are you going to choose: a $4 latte or dinner for your kids?
So what does all of this mean? Probably not much, unless you’re still one of the few people investing in the stock market or still employed at Starbucks. I still stand by my original argument that there are plenty of people who frequent both restaurants, so it’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison. There just happen to be a lot fewer folks queued up for coffee than there used to be.
But for the record, if I had to make the choice, it’s still Starbucks every time.
Previously:
Drive-thru demographics: Starbucks vs. McDonald’s
