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.

I’m not proud of it, mind you. But there are times when it’s just too dang far to drive to the nearest Target or Kroger or whatever.

I bring this up because of the 2005 documentary “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices”, which I watched for the first time this weekend. It’s an extremely biased look at the evil spawn of Sam Walton. How it’s destroyed Main Street USA. How it’s condemned its employees to poverty. How it thrives on cheap Asian sweatshop labor. How it gets millions in tax breaks, promotes crime, and sacrifices puppies in bloody Satanic rituals. (OK, that last part might be an exaggeration.) The documentary had plenty of statistics and tear-jerking firsthand testimonials to back up its claims, and I don’t doubt the validity of any of them. But here’s the thing: Walmart is not the problem.

At least it’s not entirely the problem. And I don’t even think it’s necessarily the cause of the problem so much as a reflection of how the rest of the world is changing.

Yes, Walmart has caused the closure of a lot of locally-owned mom-and-pop businesses throughout the country. But if it hadn’t been Walmart, it would’ve been Target or McDonald’s or Barnes & Noble or Home Depot or somebody else. Yes, their employees make barely over minimum wage and can’t support a family on their paychecks. But why would anyone think you could support a family by working as a part-time cashier at a grocery store? How is that really Walmart’s fault? Has it gotten millions in tax breaks and exploited Asian sweatshops? Absolutely, but so have a lot of other companies.

I’m not saying that any of that is right; it’s not. But the world is changing, and it’s not realistic to expect otherwise. And that change doesn’t begin and end with Walmart. Look at the publishing industry. One could argue that retail giant Barnes & Noble caused the death of other traditional bookstores. But Amazon caused the bankruptcy of Barnes & Noble. Best Buy and Walmart may have caused the end of traditional music stores, but iTunes has since overtaken each of them. Blockbuster may have dominated the video rental industry, but they were replaced by Netflix, which itself faces pressure from Comcast, AT&T, and others.

I’m not defending Walmart. Not at all. And I’m not saying we’re better off with or without them. Only that they are not the sole cause of the end of the world, as the documentary would have its audience believe.

Previously:
How the West was lost
Will the American Empire fall like Rome?
Long live capitalism

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

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.

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.

The author concluded that he couldn’t “envision the collision between these two worlds.” Personally, I think it’s more complicated than that. There are people out there that are frequent Starbucks patrons, many of whom stop by on the way to work for their daily jolt of caffeine. Of these, many of course are working adults who don’t mind paying $4-5 for their Venti non-fat vanilla latte. Starbucks is also popular with high school and college students as well, not only for its coffee but also for the social aspect of its restaurants. But high school and college students aren’t necessarily going to frequent Starbucks as often as working professionals because of more limited disposable income. Yes, I’m generalizing here, but you can see how you would end up with the older age range mentioned in the statistics above.

Then there are the frequent McDonald’s visitors, which tend to be families with young kids, which in part explains the younger demographic numbers as well as the difference in income levels.

But I really don’t think you can make direct comparisons between McDonald’s and Starbucks because while they are both fast food restaurants, they serve very different purposes. McDonald’s core product is fast, cheap, greasy burgers and fries. Starbucks core product is premium coffee. McDonald’s, home of the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Filet-O-Fish, will never replace Starbucks, even with an espresso machine next to the McFlurry dispenser. And even serving hot sandwiches, Starbucks probably won’t be confused with a McDonald’s (unless perhaps it adds a playground to each of its stores).

So while there are stereotypical Starbucks customers and stereotypical McDonald’s customers, the two groups aren’t mutually exclusive. There are plenty of people that frequent both, which leads me to think that each company will probably have moderate success with their expanded menus while remaining limited threats to each other’s business.