Starbucks Raised the Price on the PSL

Photo credit: ND Strupler, CC BY 2.0.

This week marked the opening of PUMPKIN SPICE LATTE SEASON, which Starbucks celebrated by inviting us to watch a pumpkin give birth to a latte.

As Consumerist reminds us, it’s also Starbucks’ annual price-raising season:

• Some sizes of brewed coffee will increase by anywhere from $0.10 to $0.20
• Select espresso drinks — like mochas and lattes — will soon cost $0.10 to $0.30 more
• Bacon Gouda breakfast sandwiches will now range from $3.45 to $4.95
• Cookies will also see an increase by about $0.30.

The company expects that the average customer’s ticket will increase by about 0.5% as a result of the pricing adjustment, a Starbucks spokesperson explained to Consumerist.

How can a latte cost $0.30 more but the average ticket only go up by 0.5 percent? That math doesn’t hold up. Is Starbucks assuming that we’ll order a bunch of non-price-increased stuff along with our PSL, to bring down the percentage?

Business Insider offers an even more convoluted version of this statistic:

“We expect 10% of the US customer’s average customer ticket to increase by about 0.5%  as a result of these beverage adjustments,” Starbucks spokesperson Sanja Gould told Business Insider.

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER 90 PERCENT?  WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THEIR TICKETS? NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE!

Anyway. If you’ve already bought your first PSL of the season, how much did it cost? Was it more than you were expecting to pay?

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