Coffee leviathan Starbucks wants you to kick your morning habit — no, not your coffee. God, they’re not monsters. They just want to see you ditch the disposal cups that so many of us use and then toss into a garbage can — or, yes, at a particularly annoying co-worker before our second cup. The retailer is banking that they can get more customers using reusable tumblers for their morning joe by crashing the price point, introducing a new reusable coffee cup in their stores in North America that will cost just one dollar.
The good news? The cup will run just $1, and people using it will get a ten cent discount every time they fill it up, meaning that the cup pays for itself in just ten visits to the coffee shop — which if you’re anything like us, is also referred to as “Monday.” If the behemoth that is Starbucks can get just some of its legions of customers to make the move from disposable to reusable, that could keep millions of pounds of paper cups of of landfills every year. The cups have been testing well in markets on Starbucks’ home turf of the Pacific Northwest, so getting more people to wash and carry their own mugs  — especially when those cups will set them back just a fraction of the price of fancier thermoses or resealable mugs that dominate the market right now — may be a winning move for the company.
The bad news? While you’ll be offering a helping hand to the environment, your cup will still be filled with Starbucks coffee. Can’t win them all, we suppose.
(via USA Today, image via flickr)
- With your ten cent discount, the most expensive Starbucks drink is only $23.50
- Juts make sure you keep it clean — you don’t want this caffeine-eating bacteria in there
- Coffee is good for you, and don’t listen to anyone who says different.
