So I was at Ingles yesterday and noticed the upcoming Starbucks Fall Menu at Starbuck’s had dropped. Please how do we stop this insanity. This is a call to arms that I know will not accomplish anything but I can’t take it. The beginning of a six-week marketing event dressed up as a season. May I speak frankly about the crisis unfolding in our grocery stores. It is 95 degrees outside. Cicadas are still screaming their death song from the trees. And yet I am walking down the aisle to to get some Dan -O’s Preem-O seasoning mix (which is excellent on steaks by way) and there it is in the cereal aisle, a box of Pumpkin Spice Cheerio’s. The silly season of all things Pumpkin Spice has begun.

For all of you young white women with your cozy leggings, oversized sweaters and boots the time is here. Ive heard if you say “Pumpkin Spice Latte” three times and a white girl in yoga pants will appear and tell you everything she likes
about fall. That is true.

So here are the New Drinks: Iced Pumpkin Cream Shaken Espresso, Pumpkin Spice Chai, Iced Pumpkin Cream Matcha, and the cider-inspired Chaider.

“Pumpkin Spice Latte” the one that started this ridiculous venture into stupidity contains according to every ingredient list ever published, no pumpkin. Not a molecule. Not a whisper. What it contains is sugar, condensed milk, caramel color, and a cocktail of spices cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, ginger dressed up in a name that implies vegetable involvement it never had. This is not a latte. This is a con job with foam on top. Meanwhile, the actual pumpkins sit in fields, unbothered, un-spiced, just quietly turning into gourds, wondering why these silly humans have built an entire economy around a flavor profile they don’t even contain.

But here it is as I said launching yesterday, a day here in Greenville that was in the mid 90’s. It is not fall. It is not, by any calendar, meteorological standard, or basic vibe check, autumn. It was a swelter of a day in late August.

Then there is the price. What is it $8 for a medium? Oh I’m sorry, “a Grande or is it Verdi”. When you walk in and order that “Autumn Betrayal Latte”. You are paying for the music playing overhead that’s been the same Sirius XM “Coffeehouse” playlist since 2019. You’re paying, essentially, for a corporation to hand you back a feeling you could have manufactured yourself in your own kitchen for the price of a spice jar and four minutes of standing near a stove.You are paying that just to get a feeling of a warm flannel shirt. And y’all buy it every single year, because somewhere between the syrup pump and the whipped cream, we stopped caring whether it made sense and started caring whether it made us feel like the year still had some magic left in it.

Somewhere, a Starbucks shareholder is raising a glass of fake champagne. Cheers to you, Brynn, Buffy, Colette and Estelle. You beautiful, predictable, seasonally-triggered cash cow. The pumpkin never had to be real. Only your loyalty did.