Starbucks vs. McDonald’s cage match

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There’s a post over here about Starbucks store density. Pretty interesting that there are 165(!) Starbucks stores within five miles of my apartment.

Naturally, I wanted to see how this compares to other retail chains, so I went to mcdonalds.com and plugged in my address. McDonald’s website doesn’t let you see how many total results there are within a certain radius, so I just hit the ‘show more’ button until I hit five miles. It turns out there are only 119 McDonald’s restaurants within five miles of me.

Wendy’s store locator gets the award for Most Useless Interface: when I put in ‘new york city’ and my zip code, it said there were no locations. After removing the city name and the zip code (only choosing New York from the state dropdown) there were 226 in the whole state of New York, but when I finally got it to tell me how many were in ‘new york city,’ the number was only 16.

So I guess Starbucks wins. Whatever ‘wins’ means.

4 thoughts on “Starbucks vs. McDonald’s cage match”

  1. Glad to see the Block is keepin’ ya busy! I guess you used a FranchiseIterator to count those puppies?

  2. there is a section in the movie “super size me” that deals with the penetration of the burger joints in NY city and state. he breaks it down pretty well. if you havent seen that flick its a nice after dinner mint so to speak.

  3. Yeah, that part in the movie is what made me think of comparing them, since he says that McDonald’s has the highest concentration in Manhattan.

  4. Well there are copious amounts of those things here in DC as well, keep in mind I do live next to 3 major universitys that have the highest tutitions in the nation. But as far as the “wins” thing goes, I have this to comment, Starbucks is actually one of the better if not the best of the large chain companies to work for. They give tuition reimbursement, cover half of health insurance, and keep in in these benifits are for only people who work part time. Also they use FAIR Trade coffee as well. Honestly as much as People rag on them I feel they do provide a good service. Also of note I did live in Seattle where they were founded and there was still plenty of thriving independant coffee shops (which in general I do prefer) . It is fair to say that they do some times squeeze the little guy out, but I find quite often their product or service was inferior. Lettting the market decide isn’t so bad sometimes.

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