When Starbucks bought Seattle’s Best Coffee (SBC) I sobbed a little bit. SBC had a great mocha syrup, an excellent matcha latte, and a killer Cold Brew vanilla latte but I figured Starbucks would stamp their mermaid logo all over the place and kill off all of the things that made SBC a worthy competitor.

I was wrong. Starbucks opted to keep SBC as a separate brand and allowed them to carry on in their already established ways. All three drinks survived the buy out and all was right in the world.

Well, almost everything was right – they shit canned the lids.

You see, SBC had an excellently designed cold coffee lids. They were strong enough to stack another cold drink on top of it but they had six slit start for straws, which made it easy to get the sucky thing in the drink and it clung to the straw, which helped keep liquids in.

While Starbucks kept the SBC menu the same, they replaced the SBC lids with their own.

Starbucks lids are the worst of a great many things in technology. First off, it’s got four slits for straw entry. This wouldn’t be that bad when you consider that the entire fast food industry does the same thing, but they also made the thing out of Space Shuttle Re-entry grade plastic. What I mean is that if you’ve ever tried to simply push a Starbucks straw into a lid – as you can at McDonald’s – you have a 80% chance of breaking the straw. 40% of those times, you will knock the drink over. 20% of those times you will have the straw bend and shoot green plastic into your eye.

Even if you get the straw into the drink, the amount of tension caused by the straw and the lid working at odds with each other, you will often find the thing spitting at you. Coffee gets onto the bend down lid and if you move the straw in the wrong direction, it pops up and showers you with coffee. No job – it used to happen to me all the time.

To work around the hard plastic, I often bend down one corner of the hole. This allows me to put the straw in without disaster and it works, for the most part. True, I’ve had an occasional leak, because the bent corner is bigger than the straw… yes, I’ve had a fingertip dunked in mocha because the lid was already on the drink. That’s what makes it a Workaround in the first place: not optimal but it works.

This morning I got an iced drink at one of my local ‘bucks. I picked the drink up at the bar and was about to bend down a corner and noticed something different: the new Starbucks lids have six slits now. They are still pretty strong – you could stack one drink on another with Starbucks lids; you never could at McDonald’s (too thin) – yet the straw went in without any push back. And yes, the plastic now hugs the straw much like the old SBC lids did…

First they came out with the green plug for hot lids and now this cold lid improvement?

*heart*