Food and Restaurants

Starbucks Pulls Plastic Straws Off The Shelves

Starbucks banned plastic straws recently after a social media firestorm flared up, as they do every day, about the dangers of plastic straws in the environment. Animals mistake them for food or sticks.

Personally, if I was bird, I’d much rather make a nest out of drinking straws than sticks. Straws are stronger, last longer and you can bend them into a nice classic colonial design. A nest made of sticks and string you collected from empty lots makes you look like a character on the TV show “Hoarders.”

There was a rumor that the company was going to offer paper straws wrapped in plastic, a prospect that ignited the internet in guffaws. Tweeters showed pictures of the straw. You are cutting back on plastic by packaging a different product in plastic?

The story was quickly debunked. They are not offering paper straws in plastic packaging. Instead, you can choose from a variety of helmets with cup holders for your drink. A biodegradable paper-based “curly straw” winds from the drink to your mouth to get your Starbucks goodness.

The straws-in-plastic the trolls displayed were actually candy straws. For sale for $1.75. What? Two bucks for a candy straw? For shame.

The also offer a “cookie straw.” Now this is an item I’ll pay for. Chocolate chip cookie straws distributed at United Nations meetings would reduce regional conflicts by 90 percent within two months.

Starbucks has also developed a “strawless lid” made up of recyclable content. “Strawless Lid” sounds like the name of a bag man in a 1930s mob movie.

Joe Ditzel

Joe Ditzel is a keynote speaker, humor writer, and really bad golfer. You can reach him via email at [email protected] as well as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.