Best Coffee Survey and a research methodology question

A recent Zagat survey rated the best coffee in the US. The best coffee rating went (expectedly, I guess) to Starbucks. Even though I have had better coffee at other places, I guess Starbucks combines great coffee with ubiquitous presence and therefore ends up getting the top rating. Now, I think Starbucks coffee is good and the baristas are extremely friendly, but in terms of pure coffee flavour, I would rate Panera's Hazelnut coffee higher. Also some of the Kona coffees that you find at places like WaWa are also really good. Any kind of place serving Jamaica's Blue Mountain coffee will obviously be great. So what makes Starbucks special? Are there other factors at play beyond the pure taste of the coffee.

One hypothesis is that the national-level presence of Starbucks could be contributing towards the voting going for Starbucks. In places where Starbucks has to compete with other chains like Peets (San Francisco) and Dunkin Donuts (New England), comparative ratings between Starbucks and other chains shows a narrower gap. In places where Starbucks has not competition however, it is likely to get disproportionately good ratings.

Let us say you are one of the contributors in the survey and are in St.Louis, MO. The competition for Starbucks in St.Louis is likely to be (I guess) the burnt robusta coffee at the local restaurant. In such a market, Starbucks will enjoy a clear advantage, both for the quality of the coffee as well as the ambience. So, let's say, you had to rate Starbucks on a scale of 1-5. It is likely you would give Starbucks a 4-5 in a non-competitive market, such as St.Louis, in the absence of valid benchmarks or competition to compare against. In a competitive market dominated by multiple brands, the difference between Starbucks and other brands is likely to be narrower. Also, the assertion can also be made that a more discerning audience (having had the opportunity to sample multiple chains) is less likely to give extremely high scores (4s and 5s) to any of the choices under consideration.

Therefore, the sampling design and the analysis methodology becomes extremely critical for surveys around this. To avoid the "no-competition" bias, there could a number of questions a market research analyst would need to ask herself:
1. Should we use only data points from places where there are multiple chains in the same geography? (Doesn't sound fair. We will be throwing away data, which a lot of sensible people have explained is a cardinal sin. We should probably weight the information in some way).
2. Should we consider data for the analysis only where a person has provided ratings about multiple chains voluntarily or penalize when people have not rated a chain that could have been rated?
3. Or are there modeling solutions available to manage this conundrum? Topic of my next post!