The best thing about owning mobile home parks is that it gets me out of my echo chamber. The worst thing about owning mobile home parks? It gets me out of my echo chamber. Plenty of Trump voters are extraordinarily decent people. A few of their policy positions at the state level make a lot of sense. The way to engage in politics is to engage in fact-based policy discussions, rather than to snicker and throw tribal insults. But – man! they can piss me off sometimes.
I bought my park in northern New York from a father and son who are hard-core MAGA. When I met with the son in 2020 to pick up some post-closing documents, my wife snorted when she saw the Trump bumper sticker on his truck. I said, “Stuff it. He’s a decent guy and I need to do business with him.” She said,
-Did you see his bumper sticker?
-You deal with Mainlanders all the time.
The wife is Taiwanese, and supports Taiwan independence.
-That’s different.
-You have Mainland friends. Our kids were raised by Mainland nannies. They did a great job, except for their attitude toward Black people.
-That’s different.
-Jews do business with Palestinians all the time.
-That’s different.
-Ukrainians marry Russians and vice-versa.
-That’s different.
-You married me, for fuck’s sake.
-I was desperate and lonely.
-Can you keep quiet until we are out of earshot, please?
I am on the father’s email list for MAGA memes. I usually delete them, but last week I clicked on a video clip he sent and watched it. It was labeled “Starbucks Coffee Scam”. I will not link to the clip, but readers can find it easily with a Google search. Comments in the email chain included “These people are thieves”, and “Do you drink Starbucks? Wow!” The video showed a guy pouring water from a small-sized Starbucks cup into a medium-sized cup and then into a large-sized cup. From the way the water from the small cup filled the two other cups, it appeared that all three cups had the same volume size, even though Starbucks charges more for a medium or large. The implication is that Starbucks is a bunch of thieves.
(I know that cup sizes are not called “small”, “medium” and “large” at Starbucks. Instead, they are labelled with faux Italian names. I trust that readers understand what I mean.).
There are plenty of reasons to dump on Starbucks. My favorite articulation was recorded by a guy from New Jersey who went by the name The Kid From Brooklyn who is, sadly, no longer with us Starbucks coffee is overpriced. They charge for ambiance. They label small, medium and large cup sizes using faux Italian labels. The ordering process takes up too much brain-space. But – their coffee is reliably good, they single-handedly upped the quality of American coffee, and if you don’t like them, you don’t have to shop there. But I think that MAGAland’s beef with Starbucks is tribal rather than factual. The magistas dislike Starbucks because it is a proxy for everything they hate – the Democratic party, Hollywood, Obama, electric cars, arugula. So – a criticism of Starbucks from MAGAland takes on a special tone.
The video clip is very convincing, but it seemed wrong to me, so I googled it. One of the first hits was from the fact checking site Snopes.com. Here’s the money quote:
[T]his isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone claim that different sized cups hold identical amounts of liquid.
This video is just the latest iteration of an internet prank that has been going around since at least 2016. We first debunked the prank in 2020, after a video went viral on TikTok that supposedly showed how the small, medium, and large cup sizes at McDonald’s hold the same amount of liquid. In 2017, another version of the prank focused on the Jack in the Box restaurant chain.
These videos do not show any type of “scam,” or prove that different sized cups at fast-food restaurants or Starbucks actually contain the same amount of liquid. These videos actually use tricks (some cups may be pre-filled with liquid) or deceptive camera techniques (cups may be switched when they are moved out of frame) to make it appear as though customers are getting the same amount of liquid, no matter what size of cup they order.
So, I opened the father’s email again, inserted a link to Snopes, and added the note, “Always best to fact-check”. Since then, the email chain went dead – or I was taken off the distribution list. I think that my message was not welcome. Why let facts get in the way of a good story?