An interesting thing happened today. As I was walking home from the Olive Way Starbucks, I stumbled upon a nearby garage sale. And I noticed several coffee mugs on a table. Even at a distance, I could see that one of the mugs appeared to be a Seattle city series mug produced by Starbucks. I picked it up. Lo and behold, I was stunned to see that it was the rare “mistake” mug from 2003. I had only heard about this mug but never actually seen one before. It’s extremely rare.
In 2003, Starbucks produced a coffee mug that erroneously spelled Mount Rainier as “Mount Ranier” on its side. I don’t even know of any other Starbucks typo-mug that is not a one-time misprint due to a manufacturing error. In this case, Starbucks simply spelled Mount Rainier incorrectly, and the mugs were correctly manufactured mugs with the misspelling on them. I’ve heard it said that when the spelling error was finally caught, they were pulled from the shelves.
I already tweeted about finding this, so for those of you who are reading my @SbuxMel tweets, I apologize that this is a duplicate. I definitely thought this was worth highlighting this find since many of my readers either do not follow my tweets and/or might not have seen that tweet. And if you have this mug, hang on to it! I do know that a number of my readers are collectors of coffee mugs, and just in case you’re an avid collector of mugs, I have seen Starbucks mugs show up now and then on this “I love coffee mugs” Facebook page. (Just case you need a suggestion of a coffee mug Facebook page to follow.)
Garage sales are so much fun!
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the one misprinted mug i had was from maybe just before 2003, when i was a barista at the licensed kiosk i spent so long at.
it was a christmas time mug, one of the red with white print. i think it had an upside down logo or christmas tree.
sold it, but should’ve kept.
What a great find. I imagine you could find a lot of old/rare items like that in thrift stores and yard sales around Seattle. Might be a needle in the haystack, but at least you’re looking in the right haystack!
What a great cup. I don’t know if they ever had those here in that style for San Francisco. If they did, I would get it in a heart beat
Melody I can’t imagine a better person to find this mug. I wonder how many mugs are out there with errors.
What a lucky find!!!
@Purple1 – I’d love to know how many of these mugs are in circulation. It can’t be many. In 2003, there were far fewer Starbucks. And on top of that, since it’s a Seattle mug, it wouldn’t have been sold in every single Starbucks.
In terms of products with errors, normally what you find is that Starbucks correctly designed the item, but then it wasn’t manufactured right. That’s much more common than this scenario. One of my twitter followers said that she bought a Huxley Mouse, where he was holding his little book upside down! And it has happened that words get cut off, or don’t print right – especially more common for tumblers which have some sort of paper insert in them.
@CD – That’s so true! This is a good place to find random Starbucks stuff. I still can’t believe that she was selling this mug.
That’s fun when you find a collectible like that!
I was in West Seattle yesterday at a yard sale, found a mug I’ve been looking for (with the Starbuck’s version of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”); also mugs with the pre-1992 logo. A good weekend for Starbucks finds!
I possess one of this rare misprinted “Ranier” mugs and I am looking to sell it at a reasonable price if there are any interested collectors out there! Email me with any offers, questions or to request photos .
I have one of the Christmas mugs with the logo printed upside down.