This Java Jacket Brought To You By...

To start my full work-week today, I stopped at Sheetz to get my now-usual Red Eye. I was started to see that the "java jacket," which normally hugs my piping hot paper coffee cup while protecting my hand from severe burns, was a light green instead of its normal brown cardboard. I've seen these little guys in different colors before, but this one seemed more special than most. Not only was it a java jacket, sworn to protect me, but also an advertisement, sworn to entice me.

The jacket on the cup was pushing some new Trident gum that whitens your teeth and freshens your breath. It did more than just tell me about it, the jacket also had a piece of gum stuck to it! And it was unchewed! There was a single, wrapped piece of this new Trident stuck to the java jacket with some of that rubber goo stuff that you usually stretch and snap at your friends.

I wasn't about to chew the gum, of course. I was raised never to take candy from strange coffee sleeves. But I certainly thought about this whole scheme in two different ways: the pragmatist in me says "Hey, this is a great marketing idea," while the cynic in me whines about the whole "advertisements everywhere" thing. And while it did initially give me that sort of "They Live" vibe, thinking about it further, I actually liked the idea. Every day people get these coffee sleeves on their cups, and most people probably ignore them. But if you stick a piece of gum (unchewed; really, that's vital to the marketing strategy) to the side of it, people will feel it, look at it, and maybe even eat it.

Then again, this new sleeve on my cup didn't feel like the normal jacket. It was a little looser, it was coated in some sort of gloss, and it had a piece of gum on it--which quickly grew all mushy because of the coffee-heat. It was a neat idea, but for the seasoned coffee vet it was just annoying. It's bad enough that I have my Starbucks cups giving me lessons about atheism and dying polar bears... now I have my Sheetz java jackets trying to peddle gum on me.

As you can see, I'm torn over the idea. But hey, at least the coffee was good.