Starbucks in Hot Water Over Iced Coffee

One angry customer is suing Starbucks over a common practice and it may change the way you order coffee forever. An Illinois woman is taking Starbucks to court, alleging they’re overfilling their cups with ice and under-filling their cups with coffee, thereby lying to customers about the actual amount of coffee they’re getting – and paying for.

According to the class action suit filed in Federal court, “Starbucks is misleading customers who expect to receive the advertised amount of fluid ounces… For example, if a gallon of gas is advertised as costing three dollars, and a customer pays three dollars and pumps gas, that customer is expecting to receive a gallon of gas — not approximately half a gallon.”

Um, seriously? 

The plaintiff, Stacy Pincus, says this applies to all cold beverages, including those refreshing iced teas, and goes against what Starbucks has advertised. For example, the Starbucks menu lists venti-sized cold drinks as 24 fluid ounces. But according to the suit, after ice, baritas are only doling out about 14 fluid ounces in a venti.

According to the suit (published in full here): “The amount of fluid ounces in a Cold Drink is a material fact that a reasonable consumer would consider important… Had Plaintiff and the Class known that the Cold Drinks contained significantly less fluid ounces than represented by Starbucks, they would have not paid as much, if anything, for the Cold Drinks.”

Let’s be real. We don’t have a problem with the amount of ice or coffee in our drinks. We don’t weigh our fountain sodas and demand more Diet Coke, we don’t mesure our subs and ask for another 2 inches of bread. Forgive us for stating the obvious, but ice is a necessary part of the iced coffee equation and if you don’t like it, order something else. Or have Starbucks mix you up a new one in a bigger cup, which they’re happy to do. And leave the courts open to debate topics that actually matter.