Are pumpkin spice lattes really mostly consumed by young women?
Weirdly, that’s the internet myth.
Maxwell Glick, an actor and YouTube GOOG, +0.78%[1] performer based in Los Angeles, defies it. He looks forward to pumpkin spice lattes every single year. “It’s like a celebration,” he said. When Glick heard men are sometimes stigmatized[2] for drinking pumpkin spice lattes, he was confused, but not surprised. “In today’s society, it’s ridiculous to label something masculine and feminine,” he said. “You love what you love and it doesn’t matter what you are.”
Pumpkin spice lattes have been ridiculed on social media in recent years as a decidedly non-masculine drink[3] consumed by white millennial women[4]. “It all comes back to sexism,” Min Cheng wrote in a 2015 article in The Phoenix[5], a campus newspaper for Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. “People love to hate on what girls like. When I was in middle school, people made fun of Uggs and North Faces and Taylor Swift.”
MarketWatch photo illustration/iStockphoto
When Starbucks re-introduced them last month, Cait Munro of Refinery29[6] wondered why the fall beverage had become the avocado toast[7] of spendthrift millennial women. “It’s a beverage that has come to symbolize all that is supposedly reprehensible about my (young, white, female) demographic,” she wrote. “It’s a stupid, silly stigma, and one deeply rooted in sexist double standards. And yet, somehow, it continues to plague me.”
Nearly half of pumpkin spice latte buyers are men, but just one one-third of plain latte buyers are men.
But some pumpkin spice-loving men like Glick see the funny side. He loves pumpkin spice lattes so much he made a parody music video paying homage to the drink on his own YouTube channel[8], to the tune of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.” He sings about his frequent visits to Starbucks when the drink is in season. “It’s like my life’s improving, now that I have my sweet, frothy pumpkin spice,” he sings.
Starbucks SBUX, +0.84%[9] created the pumpkin spice latte in 2003. It’s made with milk, pumpkin spice sauce — a combination of ingredients such as sugar, condensed milk and pumpkin puree — and espresso. It’s topped with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. They don’t come cheap. It costs $5.45 for a medium-sized pumpkin spice latte in a...