Do More Males or Females Visit

 Starbucks?
Abstract:

For my study, I wanted to know whether more males or females visited the Starbucks in North Olmsted, Ohio. I searched the internet to find out whether or not studies had already been conducted on the demographics of the customers and found one study done by a business class that said that the customers from Starbucks were mainly male at 55%. This supported the alternative hypothesis that there is a difference between the mean number of males and females that visit the store. So I conducted the study by finding a table near the store entrance and observing who entered, marking whether or not they were male or female. I conducted the study around the same time each of the days for fifteen minute intervals to obtain a large enough pool of samples to see if any trends were visible from the data. Generally, more females visited the store, supporting the alternative hypothesis. I expected weather to influence the size of each sample but surprisingly days that were hot received similar sample sizes to  the samples from cold days. Thus the weather was not relative to the study. After obtaining the data from ten days, forty samples were observed and input into Minitab to run a two sample t-test. A very small p-value of 0.001 was obtained, showing that there was significant statistical evidence to support that yes, at any reasonable level of significance, there is a difference between the mean number of males and females that visit Starbucks. Though because the intervals were collected at such small intervals, the data may not have been as uniform as it could've been and if the study were to be continued, data should be collected in larger intervals to obtain a more representative description of Starbucks's customers. Thus the data should not be extrapolated very far beyond the North Olmsted location.