Starbucks Name FAIL

Submission 41,873

About

Starbucks Name FAIL is a series of photographs documenting misspelled names of customers written on the side of cups at the global coffeehouse chain Starbucks.

Origin

In September 2005, Starbucks enacted a new policy requiring baristas to write the names of customers on the side of their cups.^[12] On May 13th, 2010, a Tumblr^[1] blog titled "Starbucks Got My Name Wrong" was launched, which highlights photographs of misspelled names written on Starbucks cups (shown below).

Spread

In June 2011, two additional single topic blogs titled Starbucks Screw-ups^[2] and Starbucks Spelling^[3] were created on Tumblr. On July 6th, Funny or Die ^[4] published a compilation of notable examples from the Starbucks Spelling Tumblr blog. Throughout 2012, even more blogs and websites documenting Starbucks' name FAILs continued to emerge on Tumblr, including Starbucks Can’t Spell My Name^[5] and That’s Not My Name, Starbucks^[6] Tumblr blogs in February, as well as a Facebook^[7] page titled “When Starbucks Gets Your Name Wrong” in March, which gathered more than 35,500 likes in the following two years. On June 12th, BuzzFeed ^[8] highlighted 20 tweets featuring photographs of misspelled names written on Starbucks cups (shown below, left). On September 12th, Redditor industrialove submitted a photograph of a Starbucks cup which misspelled his name “Chad” as “Shat” (shown below) to the /r/funny^[10] subreddit. Prior to being archived, the post gained over 9,700 up votes and 290 comments.

On February 25th, 2013, The Daily Mail^[9] published an article featuring several name fail photographs posted on Reddit and Tumblr. On January 6th, 2014, Redditor Gomets51 submitted a post titled "My Name is Ian and I Hate Starbucks" to the /r/funny^[11] subreddit, which linked to a photo of a Starbucks cup with the word "Eeyon" written on the side (shown below). Within 24 hours, the post garnered upwards of 10,900 up votes and 1,000 comments.