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.
