Sunday, September 07, 2008

The Legend of the Starbucks NYC mug

The usual souvenir I get when I go to a place besides a magnet and a shotglass is a Starbucks city mug. When I first went to New York three years ago, I have not started this collection, and maybe the Starbucks city mug might not have been existing yet cause I only started collecting them 2 years ago. Anyhow, I have not had any difficulty getting these city mugs in the cities I've been to including the major cities here in United States like LA, San Francisco and Washington DC. The mugs are usually available in the first Starbucks store I go into. They even have one in Bali, Indonesia.

And so I was quite surprised to find out that in Manhattan, where I think there would have the most number of Starbucks stores, the New York city mug was not available. Just around the area in Times Square there's almost one at every two blocks. However, I went to six different stores and there was no city mug! In the fifth store, we asked the staff about it and she seemed to have no idea what we were talking about. It made me wonder if the Starbucks New York city mug do exist. On the 6th store, when I asked if they have the mug, I got my hopes up when the guy said he thinks they may have it and looked at their stock shelves but...alas, nada. But he did confirm it actually exists when I verified with him if it does really exist, they just ran out of it. But then again, what if we weren't talking about the same thing? Coz isn't it so odd that all 6 stores had run out of stock? If those mugs were that in demand, surely Starbucks would have thought of producing more and sellingmore, right? So I left New York city without a Starbucks city mug with me :(

I think my family has been challenged and intrigued with this mug now. On our drive back from NY to Maryland, my new brother in law pulled the car over a stopover place in New Jersey where there was Starbucks. He said maybe they would have the NYC mug or if not, maybe a New Jersey mug, but as I have expected, nothing. Then when we made another stop over after a couple of hours, I finally found a Starbucks city mug. But it's not New York city mug, it was a Philadelphia mug but what the heck, I just bought it anyways, since my only condition for having a city mug is that I should have been to that city. And even if we're just driving through, we did stop there, so I guess that counts. I felt something odd about buying that Philadelphia mug though so I asked my new bro-in-law where we were actually. He just smiled at me. I looked at my receipt, we were in Delaware. Nyek. :/

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