The Pumpkin Spice Latte Shortage Of 2012: Another B.S. Shortage

A new marketing ploy is gaining popularity. It's called the shortage. The technique was successfully leveraged a few weeks ago to drum up press for the already over-hyped pork product we all love way too much: bacon. Now Starbucks is getting into the shortage game with an alleged pumpkin spice...

By Scott Reitz

October 8, 2012

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A new marketing ploy is gaining popularity. It's called the shortage. The technique was successfully leveraged a few weeks ago to drum up press for the already over-hyped pork product we all love way too much: bacon. Now Starbucks is getting into the shortage game with an alleged pumpkin spice latte shortage.

Last week news that some locations of the world-dominating coffee chain have been experiencing temporary outages of the syrup required to assemble the cloying beverages.

The pumpkin spice latte contains no pumpkin, and no other ingredients in the syrup have reported shortages. Starbucks has also been marketing the drink every fall for years, making a shortage early in the season unlikely.

Still, the story took off, hitting many blogs and even The Wall Street Journal. Now containers of the elixir are selling on Ebay for... oh wait. There we go. Shortage over.

I have a proposed alternative to the pumpkin latte shit show:

It's called a pumpkin. With heat, and other ingredients it can be turned into delicious things like pie, tarts, soups and really cool lanterns. You should try it.

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