| Starbucks City Mugs | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
UPDATE! Finally, Starbucks has partnered with their collateral providers to produce the Starbucks Collectibles web site. Unfortunately, it's anything but complete, reliable, or timely: for starters, two mugs are conspicuously absent from their original icon series (Dallas/Reunion Tower and New Orleans), one was never released, and items under the "Coming Soon" section been selling for...oh,...the last two years. Not to mention the fact that the entire current US series and all International mugs were just left off the site completely. Essentially, it was posted once — incomplete — and left to rot. Such is the nature of the web, I suppose. So this section will continue to live on, as it has for several years, to maintain the most complete list of Starbucks mugs possible, and — as a bonus — to tell you a little bit about each mug, and what I've got on my shelves. (Okay, that last part is mostly for me.)
In the fall of 1998, the urge to collect Starbucks City Mugs began to fester inside me, to the near obsession that it has reached today. It's all my wife fault -- she got me started. My original intention was to visit as many of the cities as possible, until Starbucks stopped manufacturing the Collectors Series of mugs around December of 1998. Shortly after that, the race began to collect as many as possible before they disappeared for good. Now I just want to complete the damned thing.
The mugs I collect belong to the older, "1994 series" or "1994-style series", with large lettering around the mug, a single image, and either the city name or the word "Starbucks" (for international ones) on the handle. Most are 24 ounces, but now the international mugs are made with sizes varying among 16, 20, and 24 ounces. A few, introduced in 2002 and later, even have embossed lettering around the mug.
Today, the US ones are only found through traders on eBay, or connections with other fellow collectors suffering the same affliction. A rash of International mugs have been coming out over the last year; these new ones are, such as Australia, Lebanon, and Qatar, are still being produced. They're copyrighted anything from 1999 to the present, but are still part of this series. The full list is on the next page.
Mike Madigan also maintains a complete listing of mugs, including photographs of the ones he owns (which is most of them), on his web site.
With all the new mugs constantly coming out from overseas, I've called a hiatus on my collecting frenzy. Now I intend to go back to my original model of travelling there to get them. We'll see how successful I am over the next few years.
If you can help me obtain any of the older series mugs I'm missing from the US, you'll have a friend for life. Mugs displayed in red denote mugs I currently have; italics for those that have already been promised or are purportedly en route to me. Some cities produced more than one mug in the collectors series; in these cases, I have the one or ones with a +-sign beside the description.