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.

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

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.

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.

Starbucks has begun offering “skinny” drinks that are served with skim milk, sugar-free syrup, and no whipped cream. As The Consumerist pointed out, this seems like sort of a non-news story since you can already order anything you want at Starbucks, no matter how wacky or expensive.

But at least one Starbucks coffee jockey has written a fiery (read: hilarious) manifesto saying she refuses to use the new “skinny” moniker, citing among other reasons her concern that people will get offended by this politically incorrect label and will sue.

So if I order my coffee black, does that mean an African-American customer could get offended and sue? Has that what what this society has come to? Imagine the horror if there’s a mixed African-American/Caucasian in the store when someone orders a White Chocolate Mocha!

(My favorite comment from the Consumerist post: “Is she gonna complain about ‘WARNING: HOT’ written on coffee cups because not everyone is hot?”)

No, the sad part is, people won’t get offended but for the wrong reasons. We’ve been trained quite effectively to speak “Starbucksese”, gladly ordering a “Venti” instead of a “Large”, so that we somehow don’t feel ripped off by paying $4 for a cup of coffee. Every time I order my black coffee “with room” (to reduce the chances of spillage), I die inside just a little, knowing that I purposefully asked for less product for the same amount of money. But we’ve come to accept our fate in exchange for our caffeine fix to the point where they could call it a “Super Deluxe Hairy Mole Rat Latte with Half-Calf” and we would order it proudly.

(The Consumerist is also reporting of at least once instance where a locally-owned coffee shop’s business went through the roof when a Starbucks opened next door. Starbucks, they reasoned, did the marketing for them to attract the customers, but then the customers went next door for their coffee when the Starbucks lines were too long. No word on whether the locally-owned coffeehouse offended their customers with politically-incorrect coffee lingo.)