How Ordering Social Media Drinks At Starbucks Could End Up Costing You More

Starbucks is well-known for its secret menu offerings, some of which have become so popular that they are now official menu items, such as the famous Pink Drink. However, since the secret menu is not a real menu and simply consists of popular ordering hacks, baristas often won't know the drinks by name, and some can be difficult or expensive to order.

For instance, a post on the Facebook group Iced Coffee Lovers showed off a secret menu item called the "Kinder Bueno drink" that brought one Starbucks employee on Reddit a great deal of annoyance. User u/_bimbobaggins stated in a thread on r/starbucks that a customer tried to order it as a mocha, despite the fact that the recipe contains no espresso. When they tried to save the customer some money by ringing it in as a milk with additions instead, the customer argued that the drink would not come out the same if not rung in as a mocha, despite the ingredients being the same.

Though u/_bimbobaggins tried to save the customer money, you may not get a Starbucks employee who does the same when ordering a secret menu drink. Therefore, you should consider what additions or subtractions you're making to any drink and try to figure out if there's a drink that more closely aligns with what you're ordering than the suggested base, as drinks tend to get more expensive the more they stray from the menu.

There have been a lot of Starbucks secret menu drinks with confusing, expensive, or even impossible recipes cropping up online lately. Many people blame this trend on the recent rise of AI generated content and social media bots. Under u/_bimbobaggins' post, u/dks64 referred to the Iced Coffee Lovers Facebook group the Kinder Bueno drink was seen on, saying, "This group is all bots and scammers. It shows up on my suggested feed and it's always posts from Reddit or other stolen content."

Other Starbucks employees have bemoaned this trend as well, with user u/duckie_pluckie stating on another Reddit thread that "The amount of people trying to order drinks that just simply don't exist baffles me. A lot of them were people who fell for the new 'trend' of AI generated Starbucks drinks." They mentioned that some of these drinks cannot even be made at Starbucks, thanks to mistakes in the AI generated recipes, and that customers will become rude when refused these impossible drinks.

While there's no definitive way to know if a secret drink recipe you're seeing is AI generated, you can avoid embarrassment (or financial ruin) at the Starbucks counter by simply evaluating the recipe and making sure it doesn't make the drink needlessly expensive or include ingredients Starbucks doesn't have. And of course, if you do accidentally order a drink a Starbucks employee cannot make, be sure to be kind and courteous to the baristas regardless.