McDonald's and Starbucks: who touched whose Coffee

Starbucks, a world-renowned coffee chain, announced on January 30th that it was shutting down its underperforming US chain stores. Given the current weak consumption and avoiding "fighting" among peers, it will slow the pace of domestic expansion of new stores. McDonald's, a global fast-food chain, said on January 29 that it plans to open 125 more stores in China and 140 in India this year to further expand the Asian fast-food market. On the other hand, Starbucks faces fierce new competition as fast food giant McDonald's is expanding its range of coffee drinks.

It may never be a successful business to let the aroma of coffee pervade every corner of the world. Jim Donald, global CEO of Starbucks, has spent nearly three years trying to deny this. But he failed. While the Starbucks mermaid icon can be seen in more and more cities around the world, the sales growth of the world-famous coffee chain has been habitually slowing. The share price has fallen by nearly half in a year. At the beginning of 2008, Starbucks' board announced its decision to remove Donald as chief executive. Now, Schultz, the founder and chairman of the company, is once again CEO.

Now, Schultz will direct a new war. This is probably something he has never experienced before-while it is widely believed that the US economic downturn, rising dairy prices and more consumers choosing to brew coffee at home are the main reasons for the decline in Starbucks' performance. McDonald's, another giant that has risen by virtue of its fast-food chain, has made a big profit by selling more and more coffee drinks. While Starbucks shares halved, McDonald's shares rose 30%.

Customers competing with McDonald's for coffee drinks are more humiliating than challenging-perhaps it has become Schultz's sentimentality. The scary thing is that in a completely caffeinated society in the United States, when a consumer wants a cup of latte coffee, he may choose to go to a McDonald's coffee bar instead of Starbucks. On January 7, McDonald's announced that it would set up cafes in about 14000 McDonald's restaurants across the United States, where you can drink specialty coffee such as cappuccino, latte and mocha, as well as special baristas to mix any coffee you want.

In the near future, McDonald's plans to add more types of beverages such as sweet tea, Farabee and bottled drinks. You can imagine what it will bring to McDonald's. In terms of price, the unit price of McDonald's drinks is about 50 cents lower than that of Starbucks, and it attaches great importance to quality assurance. It is worth mentioning that McDonald's coffee emphasizes the diversity of quality and variety, which will bring favorite choices for consumers of different tastes. In terms of taste, McDonald's market researchers even follow consumers into their cars and into their families to see how they choose coffee beans and ingredients. Of course, it also includes following them into Starbucks. Fortunately, for Starbucks, the humiliation is not intense. After all, there are still many loyal McDonald's customers who can't tell the taste of lattes from cappuccinos, and McDonald's accounts for only 1% of the coffee market. But perhaps what eventually unnerved Schultz and eventually made a comeback, a consumer report began to point out that even McDonald's coffee tastes and quality better than Starbucks'.