Pumpkin Spice is a cheap business ploy

October 29, 2018 — by Allen Chen

Reporter exposes the corrupt corporate scam that is pumpkin spice.

Whenever fall rolls around, there’s always a sudden spike in pumpkin spice products. Typically, Starbucks leads the charge with its infamous Pumpkin Spice Latte. Throughout the season, other brands join the horde until every grocery store becomes an orange-brown blur.

This year, the pumpkin spice fiasco has gotten an even earlier start, with Starbucks releasing its latte Aug. 28 compared to last year’s Sept. 1. In addition, many more brands have joined in this year, with available products ranging from pumpkin spice bubblegum to pumpkin spice phone cases.

This is not OK.

Pumpkin spice, despite its initial appeal as a seasonal special item, is literally just a bunch of spices mixed together. You could make a Pumpkin Spice Latte with just a regular latte and two spoons of cinnamon and nutmeg.

The most scandalous crime of pumpkin spice is that it doesn’t even have any pumpkin flavor in it. The best way to explain why this annoys me so much is with another misnomer: orange oil. It sounds like it should be something you drizzle over a barbeque for extra tang, not something you drizzle over a house to exterminate wood-eating pests.

Similarly, pumpkin spice sounds like spice from pumpkins, not the orange-ish pumpkin-less powder that gets dumped onto everything during the fall. It’s as if the word pumpkin was only tacked on to make it seem more seasonal. Imagine if the Pumpkin Spice Latte was just the Spice Latte. The word pumpkin is just added to boost fall sales.

They might as well just slap on some more seasonal words and sell the same drink year round. In the winter, snowball spice latte. In the spring, anti-allergy latte. In the summer, why not just call it the sun-baked iced latte?

In order to combat the pumpkin spice scourge, I have decided to go around throwing pumpkin pulp at anyone I find consuming pumpkin spice-flavored creations. Maybe they’ll catch some in their mouth and realize that their beloved pumpkin spice actually tastes nothing like a pumpkin.

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