If you’ll grant me a moment of pontification, I think words matter. Maybe it has something to do with my job making words good, but I think they are pretty important. Hell, the whole reason we’re yelling at each other on the internet instead of around a fire in a cave somewhere (and other less awful uses of human ingenuity) is our ability to accurately relay information across the generations. And out best way to do this is with language.
Starbucks disagrees, and has for a while. You don’t really need to look much further than their treatment of words like cortado, transparency, good (see: Oleato poopy pants), etc. for the fact to aver itself. Or you can ask a barista at your local coffee shop for a macchiato and watch the life drain from their face.
So words don’t really have meaning for the ‘Bux, it’s more about vibes. And the word they’re vibing with right now is “secret”. As in a secret menu, that they have now added to their app, which they are hyping with a contest to win $25,000.
There is a certain appeal to the secret menu. To be in the know, part of a privileged few with access to a completely different experience than the rest of the world, it adds a little excitement to the process. It was the entire business model of the 2010’s speakeasy craze, and the In-N-Out Burger secret menu remains the stuff of legend. It’s why people want to be regulars at bars and restaurants and cafes. You get to feel like you’re a part of something in a more intimate way. But the secret is the thing.
Once you start blasting it out to the world—like putting it on an app, and sending out a press release, and hosting a $25,000 contest—it is no longer in any logistically sensible way “secret”. The new Starbucks secret menu appears to be a lot of cold foam-based add-ons, which is fine; my beef is not with the drinks themselves. You can cold foam your orange mocha frappuccinos until the cows come home and you won’t hear peep out of me.
The gripe here is that broadcasting the secret menu is anathema to the idea of the secret menu itself. It is an Orwellian abuse of language, real death stage of capitalism stuff, and the mind recoils in horror. There is of course the whole definitional thing, which in and of itself is a hill I’m ready to die on. But there’s also the soul of it. The secret menu is the little treat for the customer, the thing a shop does not to turn a profit per se because it’s neat and fun. There’s an understated cool to leaving an easter egg that may or may not ever be found.
Putting a secret menu on an app and promoting it via contest and press release campaigns is neither understated nor cool. It’s desperately throwing shit at the walls and seeing what sticks. One of the first spaghetti tosses by new CEO Bryan Niccol was downsizing the menu, but I guess those noodles didn’t quite adhere like he hoped, so maybe expanding is the ticket? This is a person who earns the second-highest ratio between executive and median worker pay in all of corporate America, according to a recent AFL-CIO report, at 6,666:1, do with that number what you will.
It’s the feverish stupidity of it all. Like how Starbucks is “pioneering” the coffee shop of the future by ripping off second wave cafes. Add “pioneer” to the list of words that don’t mean what they think it means. “Seasonality” is another one, which is why they are releasing fall flavors in August.
There’s probably some larger point to be made about the Post-Truth world we find ourselves trapped in and how Starbucks has become the official coffee shop of our brain melting duh-duh “this is fine” epoch. We aren’t exactly making it hard for AI to commandeer the whole enterprise of human culture, are we? But I’ll let the next great civilization’s anthropologists untangle where it all went wrong. It probably didn’t start with Starbucks sweaty secret menu app. It merely amounts to yet another entry in the Principles of Newspeak: a secret menu that is inherently un-secret.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
