The Starbucks Red Cup Controversy: Who Cares?

Have you heard about the Starbucks Red Cup Controversy? Oh, you haven't? If it's been labelled as a controversy, it must be serious right? What have those corporate monsters done? Who's died? What blew up? Won't someone please think of the children???

Well, the controversy is that the red cup that Starbucks releases every year for Christmas, a cup that normally sports festive scribbles and designs plastered all over it, is now simply a red cup. The change was explained by Starbucks vice president Jeffrey Fields who claimed that the company "wanted to usher in the holidays with a purity of design that welcomes all of our stories."

Some people think it's a great idea, some people are upset about the change. There are of course plenty of nut jobs on both sides, for and against, taking the whole thing too far, but that always happens so let's just ignore them. The real issue here is that this has managed to make news headlines and motivate me to write an article about it, so it's not exactly a little article you find hidden at the back of a newspaper. This is a thing, this is important enough to the point that the public needs to know.

Why? This has got to be one of the most stupid things I've ever heard of. We have real things to report and discuss in this world, like war, horrifically unfair laws, world hunger and terrible crimes committed by terrible people. Instead, here we are discussing the merits of a squiggle on a cup. The greatest tool for creating social, political and cultural change in the history of the human race, social media, is discussing why it's important to have pretty cardboard that gets binned after twenty minutes. There are so many things I want to say right now, but I've literally got a headache from trying to figure out how the West is as rich and powerful as it is when it's populated by so many stupid and self-obsessed people.

One day we'll see the end to this kind of meaningless bullshit, but until then, Starbucks gets free publicity, keyboard warriors still exist and I am left feeling more depressed than usual at the thought that this is what I'm meant to care about.