I bought the viral Starbucks bear cup after camping outside the store at 1 a.m. They only had 2 in stock.

"For the next month, my partner and I talked about how we were going to get the bear cup the day it came out on November 6 th. But we thought it would be easy, just walking into the shop at noon on the launch day. We began to notice that other people had made the same plan. All over social media, the cups were going viral. Everyone was nuts about this bear."

"On the evening of the 5 th, we mapped out our five local Starbucks stores and visited the busiest one to estimate the number of cups they'd sell. We asked the barista how many they had - seven, they said. The same barista told us that not all the Starbucks would have the cups, and for the ones that did, each would have a different number to sell."

A 34-year-old in Tulsa camped outside a local Starbucks to obtain a limited-edition holiday bear cup after the item went viral. He and his partner tracked five nearby Starbucks locations and visited the busiest store the evening before release to estimate inventory. A barista reported seven cups at one store and varying allocations across locations, with the closest store expected to have between one and seven bears. After a month of anticipation and noticing widespread demand on social media, they decided at midnight to camp out to secure a cup, an experience that felt nostalgically youthful.

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