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\n Photo: Jacob Moscovitch\/New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
At 3:30 p.m. on a recent Monday, inside the Starbucks on the corner of 66th and Amsterdam, backpacks and instrument cases were strewn across every available surface. The line to order stretched halfway through the store, and at the mobile-order pickup station, half a dozen translucent plastic cups glowed in shades of pink and purple, sweating gently, waiting to be claimed. Clusters of kids \u2014 girls, mostly \u2014 hovered near the pickup counter, heads bowed over one another\u2019s phones. They came here in wide-legged jeans, miniskirts, baggy sweats, and crop tops; with bed heads and blowouts; in yoga pants, vintage tees, and so many different colors of Sambas. They are New York City\u2019s teenagers, recently disgorged from nearby high schools, and for the rest of the afternoon, this Starbucks would belong to them.<\/p>\n
Every seat was occupied: girls on boys\u2019 laps, boys sipping Frappuccinos and watching basketball highlights, a few stray middle-aged people looking mildly uncomfortable to have found themselves inside a de facto student lounge. A girl in sweats scrolled through TikTok and nibbled at a croissant while waiting for a Strawberry A\u00e7ai Lemonade Refresher, light ice, no strawberries. \u201cI was just here two hours ago,\u201d another customer announced to her friends.<\/p>\n
Chloe, a 15-year-old relaxing with a venti Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino on an oversize couch, told me she has \u201cthousands\u201d of Starbucks-drink photos on her phone. \u201cIt\u2019s just \u2026 aesthetic,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a thing.\u201d Her friend Blanche \u2014 a self-described \u201cchai girlie\u201d \u2014 showed me a recent Instagram Story, a curated gallery of her past orders.<\/p>\n
Jessie, a high-school senior, wrote her college essay about Starbucks. \u201cEver since high school started, I\u2019ve been ordering a lot of Starbucks,\u201d she explained. She started with Frappuccinos; when she became a junior, she raised her standards and switched to black coffee. Now, in her senior year, she\u2019d arrived at a new equilibrium: \u201cI realized I can achieve my goals without being so harsh on myself.\u201d She smiled and took a sip of a purple Iced Ube Coconut Macchiato, new on the spring menu.<\/p>\n
This particular Starbucks \u2014 a large corner location within spitting distance of multiple schools \u2014 is slammed with teens. But scenes like this play out in neighborhoods all around New York City and in cities and suburbs across the country. In recent years, cold, sweet, customizable drinks \u2014 Starbucks Refreshers, \u201cdirty sodas,\u201d boba teas, pastel matcha lattes \u2014 have become a core element of teenage consumer culture, right up there with Stanley cups, Korean skin-care routines, sneaker drops, and extended Fortnite sessions. In one recent consumer survey, half of Gen-Z respondents said they considered their favorite beverages to be \u201cpart of their personality.\u201d<\/p>\n
The trend has spawned a fleet of new chains (and new drinks at old chains) intended to lure the same audience. In New York, Blank Street<\/a>, the fast-growing matcha and coffee brand, has become a magnet for teen girls; Cool Sips<\/a> brought Utah-style dirty sodas to Manhattan with four locations and counting; and boba shops like Tiger Sugar<\/a>, Gong Cha<\/a>, and Boba Guys<\/a> do healthy business among the too-young-to-vote crowd. Dunkin\u2019 has been chasing the same teens with its own Frozen Matcha Lattes, Refreshers, and an ever-expanding menu of flavored iced drinks.<\/p>\n Nationally, growth has been explosive. Dutch Bros<\/a>, a drive-through coffee chain best known for its extravagant iced drinks, has more than doubled its footprint in the past five years and now operates over 1,100 locations<\/a> in 25 states with plans to nearly double again by 2029. Rival 7 Brew<\/a>, with over 600 locations, saw its own sales more than double between 2023 and 2024. And Swig<\/a>, the Utah-based chain that helped launch the dirty-soda category \u2014 drinks like Dr Pepper and Sprite doctored with syrups and coffee creamers \u2014 has expanded to roughly 120 locations<\/a> across the South and Midwest.<\/p>\n Even fast-food chains and big soda are muscling in. Chick-fil-A opened Daybright<\/a>, an experimental \u201cbeverage-forward\u201d store outside Atlanta. PepsiCo is launching Dirty Mountain Dew<\/a> in bottles, while McDonald\u2019s and Taco Bell are both building out their beverage menus<\/a>. \u201cThey see it as a way to connect with young consumers,\u201d says Duane Stanford, the editor and publisher of the trade publication Beverage Digest.<\/p>\n Starbucks, for now, at least, remains the market leader. In Piper Sandler\u2019s most recent \u201cTaking Stock With Teens\u201d survey, which polled over 6,000 American teenagers, Starbucks was the preferred beverage chain<\/a> for over half of respondents. A spokesperson for Greenlight, a kids\u2019-debit-card company that tracks spending across 6.5 million families, tells me the coffee chain is one of the top food merchants among its users. As my friend Jenny, a West Village mom of three, puts it, \u201ca Starbucks cup is the must-have accessory\u201d for tween and teen girls. Jenny\u2019s 14-year-old daughter recently asked for $10 to give to a friend who was charging a fee to pick up Starbucks orders for the other girls on her school bus. \u201cI\u2019ve got to admire the entrepreneurship here,\u201d she says, \u201cbut I told her this was a onetime thing.\u201d<\/p>\n The ritual of teenagers bonding over sweet drinks is an age-old phenomenon, from the soda fountains of the 1940s and \u201950s, to fountain Cokes at Sonic drive-ins, to the 7-Eleven Slurpee runs that, in my own youth, were a rite of passage for any kid with access to a car. Starbucks has taken this experience and turbocharged it.<\/p>\n The evolution started, ca. 1993, with the Frappuccino. As with penicillin and the microwave oven, this creamy coffee milkshake\u2019s invention was an accident of history; a few rogue baristas in Southern California started blending coffee with ice, and customers loved it. At first, corporate resisted. \u201cThey thought it would compromise their authenticity,\u201d says Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University whose 2009 book, Everything But the Coffee, uses Starbucks as a lens for understanding American culture. Eventually, however, the logic of formalizing the new drink was overwhelming; not only was its profit margin outstanding, but it handily covered up the taste of coffee, which opened the door wide to younger customers. From that point on, Simon says, teenagers gravitated to the stores. It helped that the brand was trusted by parents, and the company made the stores inviting to kids, hoping to hook lifelong customers.<\/p>\n The quantum leap for Starbucks\u2019 youth appeal came in 2012 when the company launched Refreshers: brightly colored iced drinks made with green-coffee extract. The drinks look and taste fruity with caffeine from unroasted arabica beans providing a mild buzz without any coffee flavor. This was Starbucks\u2019 entry into what it now calls \u201cthe refreshment category,\u201d coffee-adjacent products meant to spike afternoon business. It wasn\u2019t long before people started customizing the Strawberry A\u00e7ai Refresher by swapping the water for coconut milk. The result \u2014 a creamy, pastel-pink drink that photographed beautifully \u2014 spread across social media so fast that Starbucks added it to the official menu in 2017 and named it the Pink Drink. Today, Refreshers are a \u201c$2 billion platform\u201d for Starbucks.<\/p>\n The cold-drink shift has been seismic: In 2013, just 37 percent of beverages sold at U.S. Starbucks locations were cold; by 2021, that number was 75 percent. Today\u2019s cold menu extends well beyond Frappuccinos and Refreshers. There is Nitro Cold Brew, iced shaken espressos, Cold Foam with flavors like lavender and salted caramel, and, launched this month, Energy Refreshers with customizable caffeine levels.<\/p>\n The company is careful about its messaging here \u2014\u00a0marketing caffeinated, sugary beverages to minors is sensitive work \u2014 but the youth-market appeal is undeniable. One recent addition to the Refreshers lineup is the Cannon Ball Drink, a neon-pink blend of Mango Dragonfruit and Strawberry A\u00e7ai Refreshers with lemonade and fruit inclusions. It\u2019s a collaboration with MrBeast.<\/p>\n In one recent consumer survey, half of Gen-Z respondents said they considered their favorite beverages to be \u201cpart of their personality.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ve tried many of these drinks, and I\u2019m able to report that they taste \u2026 fine? They\u2019re the beverage equivalent of a pleasant conversation with someone whose name you won\u2019t remember. And yet the Strawberry A\u00e7ai Lemonade Refresher and its ilk have captured the hearts and allowances of this city\u2019s well-heeled teens. Why have these drinks struck such a chord? To find out, I spent two weeks staking out various Starbucks, Dunkin\u2019, Blank Street, and Cool Sips locations as well as boba shops around New York during the after-school hours, pestering teenagers about their orders and observing the scene firsthand.<\/p>\n Ask tweens and teens what they love about these drinks and the answers tend to be \u2014 shocker \u2014 not terribly introspective. It\u2019s a lot of \u201cI like the taste\u201d and \u201cThey\u2019re refreshing.\u201d The most obvious explanation I found for Starbucks\u2019 sway with this age group is that its stores are just good places to hang out. Over and over, I watched kids huddled around phones with Refreshers, performing the ancient adolescent ritual of Doing Nothing Together. A $7 beverage was the price of admission. \u201cIt\u2019s really the only food place we can sit down near here,\u201d a high-school student named Ines told me while waiting for her own Refresher. \u201cIn the winter, this place is a lot warmer than the libraries.\u201d<\/p>\n Like those totemic Labubus, a Starbucks drink also functions as a small affordable token of belonging. This helps explain the universal appeal of the Strawberry A\u00e7ai Refresher; it is, according to all the Starbucks employees I spoke with, the most popular drink among teens despite tasting mostly like upscale Kool-Aid. \u201cThey flood in at 3:10 and order ten Strawberry A\u00e7ai Lemonades in a row, all with different customizations,\u201d a barista named Layla at an Upper East Side Starbucks tells me. \u201cLight ice or no ice, no strawberries, and then if there\u2019s one piece of strawberry, they get mad.\u201d<\/p>\n Among adults, too, the appeal of Starbucks has always been as much about the brand as the products. Simon tells me that when he was researching his book on the chain in the early 2000s, he met a man who bought a Starbucks coffee on Monday and then brought coffee from home in the empty cup for the rest of the week. \u201cYou can\u2019t carry your BMW everywhere, but you can carry your Starbucks cup,\u201d Simon says. While the brand has lost that cachet for most adults, the badge value for teenagers has only intensified. \u201cThis signifies fun, that you have enough money to afford it, that you\u2019re doing something that\u2019s slightly illicit in a country that counts calories,\u201d he says. The teens concur. \u201cI think it\u2019s an unspoken cool thing,\u201d Brynn, 14, tells me. \u201cWhen you have a Starbucks cup, people look up to you.\u201d<\/p>\n That status comes at a price. An entry-level grande Pink Drink starts at north of $6; sized up or customized with Cold Foam, extra syrup, and nondairy milk, the price brushes up closer to $10. A twice-weekly Starbucks habit can easily run $50 or $60 per month, and many of the teens I talked to said they drained their allowances or babysitting savings to fund their visits. For many New York families, this is too much to spend for glorified soda, but for the teens who can swing it, or stretch to swing it, it\u2019s the aspirational-splurge appeal that gives the drinks their status-defining power.<\/p>\n So does TikTok. Open the app and search #starbucks or #drinktok and you\u2019ll be swallowed by an endless scroll of young women \u2014 usually in their cars, often with perfect nails \u2014 narrating their custom orders and filming their first sips. The drinks are purpose-built for this: the ASMR crunch of ice being shaken, the lurid pinks and purples, the satisfying swirl of Cold Foam settling on top. Starbucks knows this; the company has created a \u201cNot-So-Secret Menu\u201d broadcast channel on Instagram to share trending customer creations, and some of the most viral Starbucks drinks of the past year \u2014 the Gummy Shark Drink, the Cotton Candy Refresher, a Cherry Refresher that customers compared to a Capri Sun \u2014 were all invented by customers and spread on social media before the company officially acknowledged them.<\/p>\n Limited-edition cups or menu items keep the fire burning. Priscilla, 10, a Brooklyn native who is partial to a Dubai Pistachio Iced Latte, tells me she collects the limited-edition cups from Starbucks. \u201cMe and my friend, we went to the Starbucks drive-through and asked if they had the teddy-bear cup, and they said they didn\u2019t, so we screamed at the top of our lungs,\u201d she tells me. \u201cWe did it twice, and the third time when we came around, they had a sign up: \u2018No screaming.\u2019\u201d Her mother says the obsession started about a year ago: \u201cAll her friends at school love the drinks, plus she\u2019s watching videos online.\u201d<\/p>\n Starbucks\u2019 drinks aren\u2019t the only ones that photograph well, of course. Matcha has become its own aesthetic category on social media, and it\u2019s driving more and more traffic to the relatively nascent, New York\u2013born Blank Street. (The company has announced<\/a> a massive new flagship location in Tribeca, which will move into a former Starbucks.) At a store on Madison and 88th on a recent Wednesday, tween girls in private-school kilts packed the tiny shop by 3:30, seemingly unbothered by the lack of seating; a store employee told me that the Daydream matcha, an ombr\u00e9 green-and-white iced drink made with matcha, oat milk, and a syrup of vanilla bean, honey, and cinnamon, was the best seller among that crowd.<\/p>\n A typical 16-ounce iced matcha latte, it\u2019s worth noting, contains as much caffeine as a single shot of espresso. Chloe\u2019s venti Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino, meanwhile, delivers a 130-milligram jolt of caffeine, which is quite a bit higher than the 100-milligram daily allowance recommended for adolescents by the American Academy of Pediatrics. And though Refreshers look and taste like fruit juice \u2014 many parents don\u2019t realize there\u2019s any caffeine in them at all \u2014 they are made with green-coffee extract, which laces a grande drink with 50 milligrams of the stuff, about as much as a can of Diet Coke. (Daniella, 14, tells me that when her parents found out Refreshers were caffeinated, they temporarily took away her Starbucks privileges. \u201cThat lasted about two weeks,\u201d she says.) Even still, the chain introduced a change to the Refreshers lineup this year, making the drinks\u2019 caffeine levels fully customizable, from zero to latte-strength.<\/p>\n More parents might be concerned about the sugar factor. Perhaps surprisingly, most of the drinks I saw New York teenagers ordering were not the nutritional nightmares that periodically make headlines. A tall (12-ounce) Strawberry A\u00e7ai Lemonade Refresher has about 24 grams of sugar; a grande Pink Drink, 25 grams. For context, 12 ounces of 100 percent apple juice \u2014 the stuff in every elementary-school lunch box \u2014 contains roughly 36 grams, and OJ clocks in at around 30 grams. Blank Street doesn\u2019t publish its nutrition data, but I tried that vaunted Daydream matcha as well as a Strawberry Shortcake matcha, and they\u2019re only mildly sweet \u2014 more grassy and oat-y than sugary.<\/p>\n