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Good Trends Gone Bad

It’s that time of the year again. The weather is (presumably) getting chillier, the trees are preparing to drop their leaves, and Starbucks has released their iconic specialty Pumpkin Spice Latte in preparation for autumn to the enthusiastic cheers of the beverage’s fans and the not-so enthusiastic tweets of its criticizers.

The popularity of the drink should not be underestimated. Starbucks has sold over 200 million PSLs in the first decade of its launch in 2003 and has “brought in around $100 million in revenue over a single season”, according to a Vox Article (https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/29/17791082/pumpkin-spice-latte-starbucks-backlash-explained). The success of PSL has also introduced a wave of other pumpkin-spice themed products, from Oreos to bologna to even deodorant. So why has such a seemingly cherished drink that has captivated the taste buds of millions of coffee lovers faced so much backlash?

The answer lies in the nature of networks and the influence of the market on consumer tastes, all of which can be modeled with graph theory. First, the connection between pumpkin spice lattes and pumpkin spice flavoring in general to Thanksgiving, holidays, and other various driving forces is established. Nodes of food items form an edge to nodes of trend setting factors such as advertising and seasonal events that they grow to have relations with, and the more edges a certain food item has, the more popular it tends to be. (This process is explained in more detail in this blog post: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/09/12/the-next-up-and-coming-food-craze/.)

Of course, not all associations are positive, and a food item can inherit negative connotations indirectly through the process of triadic closure and the Structural Balance Theory. In our example of Pumpkin Spice Lattes, the notions of autumn have grown to be associated with the drink. This edge can be viewed as a positive edge, as there is not an inherently negative effect of this connection. However, the encroach of autumn has been occurring in increasingly warm weather each passing year, introducing a negative edge between the season of fall and “agricultural revisionism” (i.e. global warming and the distancing of people from agriculture due to industrial methods, neither of which can be considered positive). As there exists edges between two nodes (PSLs to autumn and autumn to agricultural revisionism), the process of triadic closure leads an edge to form between PSLs to agricultural revisionism – specifically, a negative one to close the triangle and satisfy the Structural Balance Theory. The same process occurs with other less-than-desirable associations, hence the now common criticisms of PSLs as being too “feminine”, “basic”, and “capitalistic”.

Though the basis of these criticisms can indeed hold merit, the influence of society’s popular movements shouldn’t stop you from enjoying your Pumpkin Spice Latte if you so wish.

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