Starbucks' Inside-Out Cups Are Turning Heads On TikTok

Starbucks is no stranger to controversy. The chain has been accused of everything from attempting union-busting to underfilling their lattes, and its cup designs have caused scandal after scandal, with some customers claiming they represent a war on Christmas and are an attempt to push the chain's liberal bias, among other things. But the latest cup controversy at Starbucks may just be the strangest one yet. 

In a video posted on TikTok, one Starbucks employee showed something bizarre. A tall stack of hot coffee cups is seen in front of a dark roast coffee dispenser, but something looks... off. The camera cuts to a shot showing the inside of the cup, and suddenly the viewer can see that the cups have somehow been turned inside out, so the Starbucks logo and the text that's usually on the outside of the cup is now on the inside. The employee who posted the video just used "Wut." as the caption, and their confusion carried into the comment section.

It's not the first time these cups have appeared

TikTok users were puzzled over the cups, but had plenty of jokes about the topic. "We get in the cup and the coffee drinks us," one user commented on the video, while another quipped, "Sell them as limited edition, make some real Starbucks." But all jokes aside, this isn't the first time inside-out cups have appeared at Starbucks.

In 2014, a Reddit user posted a picture of an inside-out Starbucks cup on the subreddit r/mildlyinteresting. Then, in 2018, a couple of Starbucks employees on the Starbucks subreddit reported receiving inside-out cups at stores in Texas. In another r/mildlyinteresting post from 2018, someone shared a picture of an inside-out Starbucks cup, and one commenter finally offered up a theory as to how this happened. "I used to work at a paper cup factory. Must've been someones first day on the job and they loaded the printed sheets upside down when they loaded them into the forming machine" (via Reddit). It seems like an easy enough mistake to make, especially when you're making hundreds or even thousands of cups a day. We may never know the exact reason for the inside-out Starbucks cups, but at least we have a working theory.