Harry

At 3:30 p.m. on a recent Monday, inside the Starbucks on the corner of 66th and Amsterdam, the line to order stretched halfway through the store and half a dozen translucent plastic cups glowed in shades of pink and purple at the mobile-order pickup station, waiting to be claimed. Clusters of kids — girls, mostly — hovered near the pickup counter. They are New York City’s teenagers and for the rest of the afternoon, this Starbucks would belong to them. Scenes like this play out in cities and suburbs across the country. In recent years, cold, sweet, customizable drinks — Starbucks Refreshers, “dirty sodas,” boba teas, pastel matcha lattes — have become a core element of teenage consumer culture, right up there with Stanley cups, Korean skin-care routines, and extended ‘Fortnite’ sessions. In one recent survey, half of Gen-Z respondents said they considered their favorite beverages to be “part of their personality. Starbucks, for now, at least, remains the market leader. The ritual of teenagers bonding over sweet drinks is an age-old phenomenon, but the quantum leap for Starbucks’ youth appeal came in 2012 when the company launched Refreshers: brightly colored iced drinks made with green-coffee extract. The result spread across social media so fast that Starbucks added it to the official menu in 2017. Today, Refreshers are a “$2 billion platform” for Starbucks. Why have these drinks struck such a chord? Elizabeth G. Dunn spends two weeks staking out various shops around New York during the after-school hours, pestering teenagers about their orders and observing the scene firsthand: nymag.visitlink.me/insvm2

I need someone to explain what he’s supposed to be doing here because at first glance, I’d fail this test while stone cold sober.