There Is No "McDonald's America" and "Starbucks America"

We are constantly confronted by false choices: Are you conservative or liberal? Do you prefer Letterman or Leno?  You either shop at Barnes & Noble or at an indie bookshop. "Free trade" is either an unalloyed good or destroying society. You must take sides, whether or not there really are two "sides" to any particular question, which there usually aren't.

So when the Pew Research Center asked people whether they'd rather live in a place with more Starbucks or a place with more McDonald's outlets, David Brooks of the New York Times, who has made a career out of rhetorically (and clumsily) splitting America into eggheaded sophisticates and jus' plain folks, wrote he thought it was an "interesting" question. And he wrote that the margin (43 percent chose McDonald's, 35 percent chose Starbucks) was "surprisingly small." That, according to Brooks, "captures the incorrigible nature of American culture, a culture slowly refining itself through espresso but still in love with the drive-thru."

What it really captures, in fact, is the nature of people, when confronted by a profoundly stupid question, to react with confusion. How many of them would prefer to live in a place that has both? Or neither? How many of them don't care one way or another? More than a third of the respondents chose not to answer. Good for them.

The muddled results, though, didn't stop Pew's Paul Taylor from concluding that "McDonald's and Starbucks are the yin and yang of franchise food and drink" and that "each appeals to different lifestyles, budgets and, yes, even political ideologies."

The results show a marginal preference for McDonald's among "conservatives" and a bigger preference for Starbucks among people who make more than $75,000 a year. What does this tell us? Nothing whatsoever. McDonald's has a bigger presence in suburbs and small towns, where people are, very generally, more conservative. And Starbucks is expensive, where McDonald's is cheap.

More to the point, though, McDonald's is a burger chain, where Starbucks is a coffee vendor. (Pew's Taylor insisted that the survey was "smackdown between Big Macs and caffe lattes"—that is, you must choose between coffee and a burger.) Sure, McDonald's is rolling out coffee bars in many of its outlets (America "refining itself," presumably), but this is really a case of comparing apples to kumquats.