In this photograph are 243 empty tall cups of Starbucks coffee. This has accumulated in about roughly a year’s worth of weekdays in which I went to work and had a coffee in the morning. This excludes any day in which I redeemed my frequent-buyer free drinks, in which I’d get the venti-sized of something way more expensive and potent than a single tall cup of drip coffee.
But the point is, 243 cups of coffee equates to roughly $432.54, and this is over the span of a year, give or take a month.
Recently, Starbucks released a limited edition steel Starbucks card, complete with laser etched artwork. It cost $450 to get one, which sounds worse than it is, because it comes pre-loaded with $400, which means that you’re essentially paying $50 for a steel card. I don’t often know what I ever want, but I felt a very strong compulsion to getting one of these steel cards.
Yeah, they’re pretentious as hell, and even the VP of the company that manufactured them had this to say:
When you’re waiting in line at Starbucks, the next person in line won’t have it.
So typically snobby, elitist and try hard as it comes, but from a purely aesthetic point of view, it didn’t change the fact that I wanted one of these steel cards. For the last few days, I’d been deliberating in my head, if it would be worth it to front the $450 to get one of these, because I’d undoubtedly use the $400 that came on in, in due time; after all, I’ve already proven I can use $400 on Starbucks without any problem.
So I decided to take the plunge, and look into the steps necessary in order to get one. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, that there were coffee snobs and elitists with money to burn like me, that had already come along and snapped up all 5,000 of the steel cards. And all within two days of them being released no less, which meant while I was deliberating in my head trying to convince myself to get one, 5,000 other people didn’t have such hesitations in their heads, and now they’ll have something that I don’t have.
