This Theory May Explain Why Starbucks Employees Always Misspell Your Name

Listen up, Alesabiths, Shellsees, and Mykuls: There may be a very logical reason why the names on your Starbucks cups are often a hodgepodge of consonants instead of the conventional spelling of your name.

Listen up, Alesabiths, Shellsees, and Mykuls: There may be a very logical reason why the names on your Starbucks cups are often a hodgepodge of consonants instead of the conventional spelling of your name.

The folks over at YouTube channel Super Deluxe have drummed up a conspiracy theory of sorts that suggests Starbucks employees are all in on a giant marketing scheme that exploits your obsession with sharing pictures of coffee cups on social media because of the funny errors the baristas make.

In a recently posted video that explains the concept, Super Deluxe sends one of their employees, Molly, to several coffee shops to see what results she gets with her common and easy-to-spell name (Hi, Molly, very jealous of you!). Molly, of course, comes back with a mixed bag of results, including the ever-creative and very awkward "Mommy." This leads Super Deluxe to suppose that Starbucks baristas do actually know how to spell most names, but they are simply trolling all of us in an effort to drum up marketing. After all, all those posts on your Instagram feed of the iconic green logo are sure to be selling a few more Pumpkin Spice Lattes than if there was no such thing as viral content around.

"That’s right, sheeple, you’ve been giving Starbucks free advertising for years," the video's narrator scolds.

While this evil-genius plan seems pretty obvious after consideration (almost all publicity is good publicity, even if it's spelled wrong), it could just be that, originally, baristas did spell names wrong because they were being careless, it was loud in their shops or they genuinely didn't know how to spell "Molly." But after time, it's plausible more and more employees caught onto the trend and played it up for the likes—how very 2016 of them.

We reached out to Starbucks to see if they'd take credit for what we think would be a brilliant PR move, but they promise that any misspellings, no matter how ridiculous, weren't corporate mandated: "We have never asked or directed any of our partners to misspell names of our customers for any reason," a Starbucks spokesperson told us.

Hey, we'll play your name games as long as you keep the free refills coming, Starbucks. Enjoy yours with Super Deluxe's video, below.

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