Starbucks© Mugs

During lunch time today, I made a very rare visit to the little food plaza across the street. I am usually not a coffee person (more like a pearl milk tea girl =), but today I find myself wandering into the Starbucks there. While waiting for a latte, I found this really cool looking, red stainless steel shelled thermal container. The store employee told me that it's originally a part of the Xmas 2006 merchandise but brought out again for Valentine's day. Now that VDay's over, it's been set on sale and sale again. Needless to say, I ended up leaving with a very satisfied look of a bargain hunter. It's so pretty!

I also picked up a set of very pretty lavender cup/saucer, who cares if IKEA has similar items for cheaper, they are just not as pretty/unique... (you can tell that my girly side is in control today)... Below is an article related to other people's fancy about collecting Starbucks' mugs
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The Collection of the Almighty Starbucks© Mugs
By Cassandra Goduti

The first thing that attracted me to Starbucks was they had my favorite tea. My favorite tea being Tazo Awake Tea. I can’t live without my Tazo Awake Tea, but what really did it for me was the raw sugar and the half-and-half. But when I saw the Starbucks city mugs I just fell in love. Between their drawings and images of the cities and the size of the mugs themselves they couldn’t help but scream my name. Then I discovered all over Ebay. They looked like they were worth every penny they were asking for.

After I buy my tea at Starbucks I go and look at the mugs and the new designs they have displayed. I like their sizes, shapes, and designs, and I even like the way they use texture.

Before I knew I had started collecting Starbucks Barista city mugs myself. Now I don’t own any city mugs yet but I have every plan on getting on and I love the design on the Shakespeare mug and the Italia mugs. I think they captured the hearts of the cities. The first city collection was introduced in 1995.First was the icon series, then the collage series, and then the skyline series. It didn’t stop there because then came the jumbo sized city mugs. All their mugs are microwave and dishwasher safe.

In 2004, it was rumored in the Los Angeles Times that a woman paid $1,000 for a Starbucks mug. Leila Schutz owns 270 of them. The most she's paid was around $200 that she decided was "a bargain" for a New Orleans mug with a Bourbon Street sign. "I can't walk by a Starbucks without looking" to see whether a new city has been introduced, she says.

The most I have paid for any of the Starbucks ceramic mugs I own is $6.99 plus tax. I don’t think I would pay that much money for a Starbucks mug but to each his own. It all depends how much it is worth to the buyer.

Now although they have strayed from the city mugs, the designs of the new mugs are still pretty impressive and do definitely represent the Starbucks gourmet image. There designs are unique and even their banana leaves and mugs representing Kenya have a flair.

On Ebay they can have as many as almost 600 Starbucks mugs a day posted, new and used. They seem to be posted for as short as 24 hours to as long as 7 days. And as many as 196 Ebay stores are carrying these mugs. People buy them because they like them to drink out of and to just sit on their desk at work.

Jbelle wrote in her blog that she received a mug from Tiffeny Carleen Milbrett who is currently on the United States women's national soccer team who hails from Portland, Oregan gave a Tokyo mug to one of her fans. She has roughly a collection of 400 Starbucks mugs. There are people writing blogs looking for Starbucks mugs as well as selling them. People also seem to like showing them off,

Starbucks even came out with a mug to promote Akeelah and the Bee that they were promoting in the stores. The word on the mug was spelled correctly, the word being “meticulosity.” Printed below this word was the inscription:

adj: extreme attention to detail.

Starbucks definitely knows how to do their marketing and design their mugs, if they have me looking at them every time I come in, so must everyone else.

I do own a 20 oz thermal metal Starbucks travel mug and that I paid $20 and that was worth the investment. My tea stays pretty hot until I finish it. My unhappiness will be that the next mug I will purchasing from Starbucks will be 16 oz as opposed to 20 oz because Starbucks has stopped selling mugs of that size.

The Starbucks mug has become so popular it is now a game piece on Monopoly.

They definitely catch my eyes in term of attraction, maybe when you’re in the area of a Starbucks or happen to be on Ebay it might just be worth checking out those Starbucks© Mugs.