the tindog coffeehouse

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.

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Move over, BioWillie. Scientists at the University of Nevada at Reno are researching the possibility of converting used coffee grounds into inexpensive biodiesel.

For the study, the team collected leftover grounds of espressos, cappuccinos and other coffee preparations from the Starbucks coffee chain.

Being that the process is not particularly energy intensive, the researchers estimated that biodiesel could be produced for about a dollar a gallon. …

“We have found that biodiesel created from spent coffee grounds is stable over a longer period of time than other forms of biodiesel that have been created from feed stocks such as soy and corn,” Misra said. “Biodiesel from spent coffee grounds is a low-cost ‘green’ form of fuel that shows a significant reduction of carbon dioxide emission. It’s an excellent source for biodiesel.”

As an added bonus, the resulting exhaust smells like — you guessed it — coffee! Finally, a reason to enjoy my morning commute!

OK, time for another cup of joe. Y’know, just saving the planet and all.

Now, this is just wrong.

The Fox 5 news anchors in Las Vegas have had fake McDonald’s iced coffees in front of them for two weeks as product placement.

Fake coffee on the real news, two plastic cups permanently filled with some kind of bogus drink. The anchors aren’t even supposed to acknowledge them, McDonald’s reps explain.

In related news, those smiles aren’t genuine either.

TXU is rolling out a new thermostat that can be programmed by the owner over the Internet. Sounds good, right? I mean, say you’re traveling and forgot to raise the AC before you left. Click-click-click, you’re done. Oh, but wait, there’s a catch!  TXU can adjust the thermostat, too, meaning they can arbitrarily decide to turn off your AC to save themselves money.  Um, what?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, your new $3000 Jura F90 coffeemaker, which comes with a handy Internet Connection Kit, can be apparently be hacked to unleash what BoingBoing refers to as a “denial-of-coffee attack”.

As one BoingBoing commenter put it, “For that price you can fly to Paris and sit in an actual cafe and drink 500 cups of coffee served to you by a variety of cute waiters while people-watching and reading a good book.”

Or you could just stay home and soak in the air conditioning.

First, the tech blogs started reporting that Microsoft has been giving law enforcement officials special USB flash drives to help decrypt suspects’ hard drives and extract information such as network activity from the machines. The program is called COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor).

Then the next day I pulled up the Microsoft homepage, and this appeared:

Coincidence or inside joke? Discuss while I run down to Starbucks…

With McDonald’s moving in on Starbucks’ territory by outfitting their McRestaurants with espresso machines, Time took a look at the demographic differences between the two companies’ customers.

Visitors to Starbucks.com skew female: Starbucks’ website has 8.3% more female visitors than does the McDonald’s site. While McDonalds.com visitors cluster in the 18-to-34 age range, Starbucks owns the 35-to-44-year-old group. There’s also a clear income gap between the two: McDonald’s visitors tend to live in households earning less than $60,000 per year; Starbucks customers lean toward households earning over $60,000.

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