On today’s episode of “Americans Get Offended by Everything,” we actually have a returning contestant. That’s right, folks, the Starbucks seasonal cups are back in the spotlight with the upcoming holiday season.
Starbucks officially released its 13 new red and white holiday designs Thursday. These cups were winners of a contest last holiday season when Starbucks released blank red cups and invited customers to design them.
No doubt, some will find a way to take offense to the innocuous, well-designed cups in the coming days. Even worse than those who are offended by a piece of cardboard, however, are those who loudly voice their defense of Starbucks’ cups online.
We get it. It’s a cup. No one should be making a big deal out of it in the first place, and giving attention to those who take offense to the cups is only enabling their whining, and no one wants to hear more whining.
We saw this in recent history with the green and white Unity Cup that Starbucks released leading into this political election season. Somehow, a group of Republicans decided that a nice drawing of people holding hands on their coffee cup was a liberal scheme to make us vote for Hillary Clinton — hang on to your tinfoil hats.
Well, if it was somehow a sneaky political move, it obviously didn’t work, but even worse than this group of obviously unintelligent complainers were the thousands more who decided it was their moral duty to defend Starbucks and their green cup.
The Editorial Board understands people feel a strong connection to their favorite brands. We too spend way too much money on overpriced coffee, and the Starbucks green cups obviously didn’t offend us.
People on social media need to understand that by tweeting at these people who take offense to a cup they are giving the complainers more attention and a larger platform to spread their silly conspiracy theories.
The Unity Cup haters got so much attention that major news networks such as CBS had actual airtime devoted to talking about them. If social media users had just ignored the people complaining about the cups, they never would have gained enough traction to become a news story.
This goes beyond the minor issue of just Starbucks coffee cups. Social media as a whole invites people to overreact. A group of just a few angry people can get so many responses that they become a news story and a national issue. We make these problems bigger than they need to be by giving them false validity, and it needs to stop.
So whether you love Starbucks’ new holiday cups moving forward or you’re somehow offended that they picture snowflakes rather than Jesus at the Last Supper, please keep it to yourself. Giving undue attention to the complainers will make you just as annoying as they are. We’re all paying too much for the coffee anyway.
