McDonald’s Coffee Better Than Starbucks

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 3, 4:26PM EST

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Consumer Reports says that McDonald’s (MCD) coffee tastes better than Starbucks (SBUX). Starbucks stockholders better hope not, because McDonald’s is on a roll. While Starbuck has begun serving food, McDonald’s is expanding its coffee menu. It was just a matter of time before the two chains got in each others faces.

It is not that Starbucks is having any trouble selling coffee. It just announced a quarter on steroids. Revenue rose 22% to $2.4 billion, and same store sales were up 6%.

Ditto, McDonald’s. Fourth quarter profits doubled to $1.2 billion on an revenue increase of 11% to $5.6 billion. The company plans to open 800 stores this year.

Starbucks has stated that its long-term goal is to have 40,000 stores worldwide. McDonald’s is close to that number already. The more each grows, the more they will have to go after the same customers. And, physics tell us that people cannot be two places at once.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.