We've hit a godless stage of coffee consumption.
Can we save the turtles in other ways? Asking for a friend...
There’s a whole long summer ahead, and the attendant goofball overture is in full swing. I have abducted my poor girlfriend into the horrors of hiking up actual literal mountains and gazing upon nature, which has spawned a newfound birdwatching hobby within her. These weekend adventures have mostly pulled us away from the kind of free-associative people-watching that comes with day drinking at patios, or day drinking at a park, or day drinking on a beach, or day drinking during Teams calls. It would be dispiriting and dull for me to revisit the quagmire of wanting to be outdoors in sunny weather while drowning in your sweat, so I will instead parse the strawless iced coffee cup as a unique aesthetic experience and as an engineering concept.
It has become a grudging consensus that if we have any chance of tackling climate change, we will have to make some personal sacrifices to our consumerist lifestyles. I have aired my grievances about the minor inconvenience of paper straws, but it’s time to get decently granular about a more relentless terror that plagues my cold brew consumption.
Specifically, this post is directed at the inventor of the strawless iced coffee cup. If you are not responsible for this monstrosity, you can keep scrolling through Substack—or feel free to unleash your invective in the comment section, restack with some animated commentary, hit like and subscribe, register for my exclusive Alpha-brain Masterclass, etc.
But if you are the inventor of the strawless iced coffee cup, and you made a series of horrible life decisions that have led you to somehow reading This is a Newsletter!, it should be safe for me to assume that I have your attention.
So I must ask:
How would you rate your performance?
Do you think this is working?
Do you know it’s not working?
Are you open to a performance improvement plan?
Were you handed a brief before you worked on this?
What was the creative concept?
What were your KPIs?
What was your go-to-market strategy?
Who was in your marketing demographic?
Was this a first draft and it went to market without realizing your full vision?
Did you have a better version, but the top brass decided to make it more precarious?
Are you bringing enshittification to coffee?
Are you misanthropic and/or thrive in chaotic evil?
The first few times I used the strawless iced coffee cup, I must admit that I was dazzled by the tantalizing possibilities of never having to use a paper straw again. Then I very much did not enjoy it one time and have never looked at them the same. I do not need to explain or elaborate.
If the goal of this nonsensical contraption was to make sure the lid was never fully sealed with the cup, so little drops would drip and splash on everyone, then you nailed it.
We either accept that climate change is winning or we spend a few years stripping this down to the studs and going full Oppenheimer on this shit.