Coffee Time…

September 20, 2022 2:25 pm Published by Very Famous

Starbucks is getting into NFTs (“immersive coffee experiences”) and Dunkin is debuting “Gen Z” billboards…I just don’t know. The marketing moves of Dunkin I’m less personally invested in, but the Starbucks news felt a little taxing. In 2008, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth said, “Starbucks is the new record store, right?” and in 2010, Starbucks discontinued their Duetto Visa Card, which was a Starbucks-themed credit card. Those who signed up got a book of poetry called Poems from the Land of Coffee. I learned about this branding maneuver from Starbucks Melody, an unofficial source of Starbucks news written by Melody, a lawyer, Air Force veteran, and Starbucks fan.

I would not have gotten a Duetto card because I do not want to associate debt and a sinking feeling with my trip to Starbucks, a time when I feel like anything could happen. “I had even put the kids’ tuition on the Duetto card to get the ‘Starbucks bucks’ rewards that were redeemable in stores,” a Duetto card holder told The Consumerist. This makes the upcoming era of immersive coffee experiences feel like a comparative romp. Tuition should not be associated with Kenny G’s frappuccino! This brings me to today’s fun point: I think maybe we’ve developed our collective healthiest-ever relationship with chains. We parody them, we learn their secrets, and we sort of pick and choose how they fit into our lives. It’s not a perfect arrangement, but it’s sort of Long Island Iced Tea punk.

Before the internet, maybe a knock-off recipe of the Red Lobster biscuit was shared in a church cookbook. Now, we’ve got people printing radioactive Starbucks and Louis Vuitton logos side-by-side and selling them cheaply, employees showing us the gray stainless steel behind the pink, orange, red and yellow, and what I’m about to display below, these coffee-shop candles. Today’s corporate branding exclusively targets someone who is both somehow 15 and 50, but maybe projected visual dignity and the muted-neutral brand poetry book were an illusion anyhow. Here’s a Blogspot-era poem!

Saffron wipes down the counters diligently.
She wears a belt that looks like a piano keyboard.

I suspect that

Saffron

is not

her real name.

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