Why These Unusual Starbucks Food Bags Had People Bringing Up McDonald's
Who else remembers playing the logo quiz game back in 2012? If you never played it, it was a very simple, free app, where different logos were shown on the screen and you had to fill in the name of the company. It ranked No.1 on the list of free iPad apps and the No. 3 among free iPhone apps at one point because it was not only fun but showed us how ingrained in our brains these logos were (via Forbes). Some logos were easier to identify than others, like the famous Starbucks logo. We have been seeing a green logo with a modernized siren since 1987 (via Starbucks' archive), so it's no surprise that it's so easy to identify.
Over the years, Starbucks became so synonymous with coffee that you don't even need to see its name to make the association. "Starbucks Coffee" was removed from the logo in 2011, leaving the siren to "stand on her own." This logo change didn't ruffle any feathers, but when the coffee giant tried to roll out a throwback logo in 2008, which was black instead of green and featured a more bare-chested siren, people were not pleased, per the BBC. (Notably, the 2008 version doesn't even appear on the company's timeline of logo alterations). Drastic changes in branding can clearly make consumers uncomfortable, so when a customer received an unusual food bag from Starbucks, they took to Reddit for answers.
This Starbucks customer received their food in yellow bags
Starbucks has a habit of slapping its logo on everything it sells, so when a customer received their food inside of what looked like yellow parchment paper (see above), they were confused. The customer posted, "Yellow food bags? Starbucks is now serving McDonalds?" in the r/starbucks thread on Reddit. It's pretty wild how we have these brands distilled down in our minds to just colors. Starbucks is green and McDonald's is yellow, and if we get anything different, it's a glitch in the Matrix.
"They're trying to make some McBucks," @babymangodragon replied to the post. "They took McCafe too far," said another Reddit user. Amongst the confusion, a Starbucks barista entered the chat to save the day. "My store has used similar bags to these when we ran out of the usual starbucks ones. someone probably had to go to the grocery store and buy those," @mania2k18 replied. While this seems like a one-time packaging switch, Starbucks did recently commit to removing toxic PFAs from its food packaging, so that could possibly come with a new look (via Environment + Energy Leader).