There is a Yeti tumbler in my kitchen that has seen more coffee than any mug I own. It goes everywhere with me. It has earned its place. Every other mug in this house is purely decorative, including the ones I paid $25 each for at Disney World, and I am at complete peace with that.
This is not a new human behavior. Your grandparents had a spoon rack. Your parents had shot glasses from every state they ever drove through. A whole generation of people collected decorative plates and hung them on walls in rooms nobody sat in. We have always done this. We find a small, affordable object that says “I was somewhere,” we bring it home, we put it on a shelf, and we feel good about it every time we walk past.
The Starbucks theme park mug is just the current version of the spoon. Except the spoon never had a Facebook Marketplace algorithm attached to it.
I looked at one mug online. One. That was apparently enough for the internet to decide that my entire identity is ceramic Disney collectibles. The ads have not stopped. I looked at that mug weeks ago. I am being followed.
What makes this funnier is that I walked past these mugs in actual parks for years and felt nothing. Stood inside the Main Street Starbucks at Magic Kingdom more times than I can count, glanced at the brass display cases, thought “those are nice,” ordered my drink, and left. The algorithm had to shame me into paying attention to something I had been standing in front of for the better part of a decade.
I’m paying attention now. Here’s what that looks like.
The Kallax Situation
The mugs live on the middle shelf of an IKEA Kallax in my office. If you know the Kallax, you know it was not designed with Starbucks mugs in mind. And yet they fit perfectly, boxes and all, like the whole thing was planned. It was not planned. It never is with the Kallax. You just keep putting things in it until it looks like a life.
The collection right now: Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Orlando, Universal Orlando Resort, Universal Studios Hollywood, Universal Epic Universe, Disneyland Paris, and Parc Walt Disney Studios. Some still in their boxes. Some out. All of them just sitting there being personality.
Not one of them has ever had coffee in it.
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The Rule
Jill and I worked out a simple system. When we arrive at a park, we check if we have the mug. If we don’t, and there’s room in the bag, we get it. That’s the whole thing. One sentence.
It took us years to arrive at this sentence, which I find embarrassing in retrospect given how obvious it is.
The Magic Kingdom mug was the first one bought under the official rule, on the trip where we decided out loud that we were actually doing this. Discovery Series, yellow circle on the front, Cinderella’s Castle and Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain on the ceramic. Bought it inside the Main Street Starbucks, which is themed to match the surrounding architecture, which means you are standing in a turn of the century building buying a mug illustrated with the park you are currently inside. There is something satisfying about that kind of completeness.
The Part Where Jill Is Better At This Than Me
We spend every minute together when we travel. That is genuinely one of my favourite things about how we do trips. So I am still not entirely sure how she pulled this off twice.
The EPCOT mug showed up at Christmas. I had no idea she had bought it. She found a window somewhere inside the park, got to the Future World Starbucks, picked up the Discovery Series, blue circle, Figment on the front, Spaceship Earth, the Guardians coaster, and got it home without me noticing. This is impressive. We were together the whole time.
Paris she did it again. I had found a deal at the Disneyland Paris Starbucks, the Parc Walt Disney Studios mug bundled with the Disneyland Paris mug for around 25 or 30 euros. Two mugs, great price, very pleased with myself. Got home. Discovered she had also bought me the standalone Paris mug. Found a window, grabbed it, said nothing, fit it into her suitcase somehow.
So I have three mugs from a single destination. OUI!
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The One That Arrived Before I Did
Francine, the amazing person behind The Pixie Dust Fan podcast travels to Orlando regularly for work. She was at Epic Universe during the opening period and messaged to ask if I had the mug. My first instinct was to say don’t worry about it, I didn’t want to take up space in her bag. Then I remembered she always checks a bag. And she’s down there all the time.
What made it land the way it did is that I do the same thing when I travel. I’m always watching for something a specific person in my life might want. Finding the right object for the right person in a place they haven’t been yet is one of the quiet pleasures of going somewhere. To have that come back to you, unprompted, from inside a brand new park on opening week, that’s a good feeling.
The Epic Universe mug sits on the Kallax next to parks I have actually visited. It got there before I did. I find that perfect.
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The Business Trip Mug
I was in Los Angeles for a Snapchat conference and had a few hours free. I went to Universal Studios Hollywood. A few hours alone in a theme park is an underrated experience. You move fast, you see what you want, nobody is negotiating with you about where to eat. I went, I rode some things, I found the Starbucks, I bought the mug, I went to my conference.
It is the only mug in the collection that came from a work trip. That distinction matters to me for reasons I cannot fully explain.
The Ones That Are Gone
This is where the regret lives, and it is real regret, not the performative kind.
Multiple generations of these mugs came and went while I was standing in the parks that sold them and choosing to order my drink instead. You Are Here. Early Been There. The Star Wars planet mugs with their dark blue boxes, Hoth in pale blue, Tatooine in desert warm, Kashyyyk in forest green, annual May 4th drops that sold out and disappeared and are now on Facebook Marketplace at prices that are not serious.
The algorithm keeps showing me those too. Just to make sure I understand what I missed.
If you are currently in the “those are nice, maybe someday” phase, I want you to know that someday has already passed for some of these. The ones on shelves right now will not always be on shelves. The spoon rack of your grandparents’ generation was full of spoons nobody could get anymore either.
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What The Shelf Actually Is
A collection of things nobody drinks from, each one carrying a story it didn’t come with.
A mug Jill bought me inside a park while we were at the park together. A mug that arrived from a friend before I ever visited the place it came from. A mug I bought twice in Paris without knowing it. A mug from a conference I went to for work and a theme park I visited for me.
The Yeti tumbler gets the coffee. The Kallax gets everything else.
And the Facebook Marketplace algorithm gets to keep thinking I am in the market for a $85 You Are Here Hollywood Studios from 2019.
I am not. Probably.