Here we are, the start of another year. And as the calendar is born anew, so too do we offer ourselves a chance at rebirth, to turn the page on bad habits and worst selves without prejudice and to start clean on a higher plane of existence. These New Year’s Resolutions are the opportunity to give flesh to ideas and to become.
For me, I’m going into 2025 with a softness of spirit. This year I’m going to be a gentler human to those whom my kindness has been found to be wanting. Take Starbucks for example. I spent 2024 talking about their various anti-union activities, the harmful labor practices found used to produce coffee they sell as ethical, that whole poopy Oleato debacle and its Schultzean imbroglio, and their supercommuting new CEO.
Did all these things happen? Sure, but what did they do to me specifically? I’m not one of the thousands upon thousands of people negatively impacted by any of these decisions.
That’s why 2025 is going to be the year that I give a kinder version of myself over to Starbucks and open-mindedly consider their various corporate machinations… wait they did what now? Uh huh ok and it’s how many ounces?!?
Starting Friday, January 3rd, Starbucks rolled out the new additions to their drinks menu for 2025, and it includes an absolutely massive cortado. Their version of the cortado contains three ristretto shots of lighter roasted Blonde Espresso to be combined with steamed milk until it reaches a whopping eight ounces.
Why?! Why are they like this? After running roughshod over the macchiato, wreaking havoc on every barista the world over who now has to clarify which macchiato a customer wants (the espresso with a dollop or the Big Gulp caramel bomb?) Starbucks is now ramping up their assault on barista interaction and flanking them at cortado. This is linguistic dereliction. Starbucks is playing god and this is some Tower of Babel-type bullshit.
And what other early-2010s-era specialty coffee menu items will they co-opt and Vitamix the language of? Are they going to start serving Gibraltars? 12 ounces only and served over ice. Will there be a Kyoto drip? A rebranded naming of their batch brew. How about a washed single origin Panama Green tip Gesha? A blend of Arabica and Robusta coffees from Vietnam, Brazil, and Colombia. The dream of the 2010s are alive at Starbucks. And why not? Words have no meaning. Howard Schultz (falsely) says he introduced the latte to America, but why stop there. Howard Schultz invented the latte. Starbucks has gone post-truth and is dragging the rest of us hell with it.
It’s all just too much. Put a cortado on your menu, fine, but actually make it a cortado. Or put an eight-ounce espresso and milk drink on there and come up a new name for it (though latte would work just fine). A pianissimo maybe or even an octado. It could literally be anything, save for the five or 10 words already used to connote a very specific espresso beverage.
Welp, we had a good run. I made it all the way to January 7th with my resolution to not mock Starbucks. 2026 will be different, I can feel it.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
