Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte: Fall’s Biggest Con Job
And the strange little spice blend from the 1950s that started it all.
The last days of summer are the weirdest kind of purgatory. The sun still roasts your back, the pool calls your name, and the kids are waffling over that last bit of summer reading. Meanwhile, the world has already ghosted summer. Football lungs its way back onto TV, stores are literally pummeling you with Halloween candy in August, and Starbucks has rolled out its annual autumn ritual: the Pumpkin Spice Latte.
Never mind that it’s 90-sweaty-degrees out. Fall now arrives when some syrupy syrup hits your cup, masquerading as pumpkin—spoiler alert: there’s no actual pumpkin in pumpkin spice. It’s just cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger, rebranded into “autumn in a cup,” because marketing. But damn if it doesn’t work: one sip and summer feels canceled.
Fun fact: the whole “pumpkin spice” thing goes back to the 1950s, when McCormick started selling a pre-mixed jar of “Pumpkin Pie Spice.” It was literally just a shortcut for bakers making pie; nobody thought of drinking it. Fast-forward to 2003, when Starbucks test-marketed a pumpkin-flavored latte in just 100 stores. At first, they weren’t sure anyone would want a drink that tasted like pie. Twenty-two years later, the PSL has become their most successful seasonal drink of all time, with more than 600 million sold.
So here you are, drinking your $7 Yankee-Candle-on-tap, pretending it says something about the season. Call it what you want, but don’t call it pumpkin.
Starbucks made it official: the PSL returned on August 26, 2025—mid-August. The leaves haven’t changed, the sweat hasn’t stopped, but according to Starbucks, it’s already fall.
And hey — if you like them, enjoy. Life’s too short not to drink what makes you happy, even if it’s fall in a cup with no pumpkin in sight.