Whole lotta Joe
Having your own reusable Starbucks cup is truly the best of everything
I am addicted to Starbucks — I'm on a first-name basis with my baristas, whom I visit several times a day — but I feel really guilty about all those paper coffee cups I throw in the trash. Fortunately, the coffee giant has come up with a way to assuage my guilt.
Starbucks recently introduced a plastic reusable cup. It costs $1 and every time you get it refilled you save 10 cents on a cuppa joe.
Starbucks recently introduced a plastic reusable cup. It costs $1 and every time you get it refilled you save 10 cents on a cuppa joe.
Approximately four billion Starbucks cups are thrown in the trash each year, the company estimates, so this is a modest start. It plans to have a place at the front of the store to recycle paper cups in all of its company-owned locations by 2015. But I like the idea of having my own personalized cup now.
Apparently so do a lot of other folks. A survey conducted by research firm YouGov Omnibus shows that more than a quarter of Americans have already bought or plan to buy one of the coffee tumblers. The Starbucks I frequent on the University of Houston-Downtown campus near the CultureMap office sold out of them and it took me a week to secure one.
The reusable cups with fill lines inside denoting "tall," "grande" and "venti"-sized drinks are rinsed with boiling water by Starbucks employees before they're refilled to prevent cross-contamination of germs (and, no doubt, liability).
Excuse me, it's time for another cup of coffee.
