Starbucks cup size: The scam that wasn’t

A popular urban rumour claims that Starbucks is scamming customers with deceptive cup sizes. (Image: gowheresg/Facebook)

Earlier this week, old rumours about Starbucks scamming its customers by serving the same amount of coffee in cups of different sizes were revived, thanks to a resurfaced video. Starbucks offers its customers beverages three sizes – tall (cups that can hold around 354 ml), grande (473 ml) and venti (591 ml). The video, however, has fuelled rumours that the coffeehouse chain is scamming its customers because cups of all three sizes hold the same amount of liquid, but customers pay more when ordering larger sizes.

The video shows a man pouring liquid from a small, transparent Starbucks cup into a larger cup. The smaller cup is filled to its brim, and one would expect the liquid to only partially fill the larger cup once it is transferred. Surprisingly, the video shows that the larger Starbucks cup is also filled to the brim.

Fact-checking website Snopes investigated the video and debunked it as a prank.

According to Snopes, the creator probably used a glass with a false bottom or edited the video deceptively to give the impression that different sized cups held the same amount of liquid.

The video, in fact, is in line with a popular Internet prank that has been doing the rounds since at least 2016.

In another iteration of this prank, a video claiming to show that small, medium and large cups at McDonald’s all held the same amount of liquid also went viral two years ago. The video was debunked as a prank by Snopes, noting that the medium and large sizes were pre-filled with liquid.

To debunk this popular rumour, two YouTubers visited a Starbucks outlet on Tuesday (May 31, 2022) to test the theory themselves. They found that larger cups held more liquid than smaller cups, successfully disproving ‘scam’ claims.

In conclusion, don’t buy into the Starbucks scam theory. Those viral videos? They are just tricks to prank unsuspecting viewers.