How is this still a thing?
What Year Is It?
Pumpkin spice latte lovers, rejoice.
You can now purchase a non-fungible token of Starbucks’ famous fall beverage, though, of course, you won’t be able to taste it — or get much else out of the experience.
As the Decrypt reports, Starbucks is selling limited edition PSL NFTs for $20 a pop to mark the 20th anniversary of these popular (and memeable) drinks.
The new sale is part of the coffee chain’s web3-forward Odyssey program, which launched last fall, and provides users with purchase rewards like coffee-making classes and free drinks.
Starbucks partnered with NFT marketplace Nifty Giveaway for the “drop.” Instead of limiting the total number of tokens sold, Starbucks is selling the “digital stamps” exclusively between October 5 and October 9.
The franchise has yet to announce what rewards users will actually get besides 250 points in their Odyssey accounts — and given the catastrophic state of the NFT marketplace as a whole, we won’t be encouraging anybody to invest.
Zombie Market
There are four varieties of these “digital stamps” that appear to correspond to the drinks themselves — iced, spiced, steamed, and whipped — though “iced” is the only actual variation of PSL that we could find on the Starbucks menu.
Although this collection seems very early 2022 — you know, before the NFT market crashed and burned — Decrypt points out that after Starbucks began giving away free NFTs last December, some were going for as much as $1,900 on secondary markets and sold out almost immediately, too.
Starbucks isn’t the only brand trying to extract worth from this seemingly-dead market. From Louis Vuitton’s $39,000 virtual treasure trunk that will supposedly grant buyers access to “twinned” physical products to Salesforce building out a market for other companies to create NFT loyalty programs, it’s obvious that companies that hedged their bets on these digital assets aren’t giving up the ghost just yet.
It remains to be seen if there’s any crossover between NFT bros and PSL junkies, but given how fast the last ones sold out, there’s a non-zero chance that they may end up being worth more than the $20 Starbucks is charging for them — which, to be fair, is only about $12 more than the price of an IRL PSL.
More on the food biz: Snack Food CEO Vows to Battle Ozempic
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