If you tried to go to your local Target last Wednesday, January 3rd to shop for groceries or perhaps pick up an appliance at a discount, you may have noticed a huge line snaking around the brick building. Given historical reasons for a large crowd waiting outside a retailer in the early hours of the morning, one might have thought it was a short period of time new Pokémon Set of cards, or perhaps a rare Nintendo bundle. But no, instead the people waiting (and fighting) in line are trying to buy a portable cup. Yes, a drinking cup.
The Stanley Cup trend, explained
The Stanley Cup, to be exact. No, not the trophy awarded annually to the NHL’s best team, but a 40-ounce stainless steel mug that keeps your cold drinks cold for eleven hours and hot drinks hot for seven hours. In November last year the The mug went viral after it survived a car fire, ice intact. It’s become such a phenomenon that collaborations with Target and Starbucks have resulted in huge lines in physical stores (they often offer new colorways exclusively in-store for a period of time before making them available for sale online) and the dreaded scourge of Resellers who… They are flocking to grab supplies and put them online. The 40 ounce cup Retails for $45 while the 30 ounces Some cost $35, but resale prices are often more than five times that. The culture of reselling Stanley Cups is so intense that sneaker resale platform StockX just started releasing the Cups in the Accessories category. At the time of writing, it is the pink Starbucks X Stanley Cup, which was released on January 3rd go for hundreds of dollars.
Read more: Pokémon Has a reseller problem and it’s only getting worse
These cups have now become the drinking vessel version of a rare Pokémon TCG set, with efforts to secure the latest release resulting in the kind of chaos we traditionally associate with trading cards. The Starbucks already waiting outside at 4:40 am, Crowds of people in winter clothes wait to be let into the shopsAnd One person claims their TikTok is live was removed because a fight broke out during the recording, in which someone allegedly cut the line, attacked a Target employee and tried to run off with a box of the coveted mugs.
I turned to my sister, a well-known Stanley cup lady, to learn a little more about the elusive vessels. She told me that the youngest Galentine’s Day collaboration between Target and Stanley was also only available in-store and drew similarly large crowds. Her most recent purchase from Stanley (she has more than one) was a signature non-collaboration mug that came in a new, coveted pastel tie-dye colorway – it was only available at Target stores from December 14th to December 24th, Before Target came on the market, it was listed for sale on its website. “I waited until 12:01 a.m. on Christmas Eve and bought it right away,” she told me sheepishly. “The only reason I did it was because it was Lover-coded,” she said, referencing Taylor Swift’s 2019 album. When I raised my eyebrows at that, she replied, “All I know is I drink 120 ounces of water a day, bitch.”
