Starbucks dynamic temperature pricing

It’s been hot lately where I live. Thankfully, I have air conditioning, but that wasn’t always the case. I remember long summer nights when I lived in LA without AC. One crystal clear memory I have is a night when it was around 100º all night and the temperature inside and outside my apartment was the same (I remember because I tried to sleep on my balcony at one point out of desperation).

One of my few reprieves during warm seasons was drinking something cold. It could be ice water or an Arizona Iced Tea. For others, it’s a refresher from Starbucks.

Recently, restaurants have begun to explore dynamic pricing based on how busy the restaurant is (this is a rebranding of surge pricing from Uber). From an economics perspective, this makes sense, but shockingly, consumers hate this idea.

I was racking my brain for a new idea yesterday and then it came to me. What if Starbucks introduced surge pricing, but the determining factor was ambient temperature rather than the busyness of a store?

Cold drinks cost more if it’s hot out, and vice versa. I assume the public backlash to this would be insane. I’ve have a lot of bad ideas in the past year and a half, but this feels like it’s in another echelon of corporate dystopia if it ever gets built.

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