Don Udel (ETC) wrote:
> "John Navas" <spamfilter1@navasgroup.com> wrote in message > On the
> contrary -- Consumer Reports suffers from a self-selected sample
>> of a non-representative universe. It also suffers from serious
>> screwups, like the recent car seat debacle. And it just rated McDonalds
>> coffee as better than Starbucks -- LOL!
>
> And once again CR is right. IMHO, Starbucks does taste burnt and it's not a
> very good value for the dollar. Given a choice between the two, I'd take
> McDonalds every time for coffee.

Besides often sitting too long, Starbucks tends to usually use very dark
roasts for their house coffee. To make it palatable, you have to add
sugar and ½ & ½. The Consumer Reports test was explicitly for black
coffee. Dark roast Starbucks coffee, that's been sitting for even 30
minutes, without sugar and ½ & ½, tastes terrible. At 30 minutes you've
also lost a lot of the health benefits of coffee, since the
anti-oxidants will be gone.

In any case, the coffee article was vastly different than the cellular
article. The coffee test was done by their staff. The cellular survey
was based on nearly 50,000 respondents, which is a extremely large
sample size with an extremely small margin of error, even when you
divide by metro area, and divide again by carrier. Remember, this was
not Consumer Reports asking "which carrier do you think is the best?" it
was a survey of subscriber's experiences. So unless someone believes
that a Verizon subscriber is likely to cut their carrier more slack than
a Cingular subscriber, you can't dispute the results on the basis of who
responded.

The only real fault with the CR survey, and in reality it's a benefit,
is that CR subscribers tend to be higher income individuals, with higher
education levels, and are more liberal. Hence they are much more likely
to travel, and even more likely to travel outside urban areas with their
phones. This gives Verizon an advantage because their network is much
more extensive than any of the other carriers.

A survey of individuals that never leave the urban area might have had
results that were less starkly different.