the tindog coffeehouse

I hate Walmart. I detest it. I hate everything about it. I hate the parking lot. I hate that the medicine and toiletries section is on the complete opposite side of the store as everything else you need. I hate that even if you’re just running in for five things, you still have to get a full-size cart because you can never find a handbasket. I hate that they have 78 checkout lanes, but only two are open at any given time. And I hate that if you use the self-checkout lane, there’s a 99.9% chance something won’t work, and you’ll have to wait around for ten minutes for a worker to come by and enter a random code that you probably could’ve entered yourself.

And yet I still shop there.

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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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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.

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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