WASHINGTON — Fall officially began at 8:06 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday with the arrival of the autumnal equinox, 28 days after Starbucks returned the Pumpkin Spice Latte to its menu on Aug. 25, according to astronomical records and the season itself, which said it found the drink already seated in its chair when it got here.
The equinox, which marks the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator heading south, arrives each year on Sept. 22 or 23. The latte keeps no such schedule. Its 2026 return came one day earlier than its 2025 return, on Aug. 26, which itself came nearly a month ahead of the season it is named for.
“I came in at the regular time. I always come in at the regular time,” fall said in a statement released through the National Office of Seasonal Scheduling, a 14-person agency within the Department of Agricultural Common Sense. “The leaves were already turned on the cups. The sweaters were already out. Somebody had already put a gourd on my desk. I was told I could sit at the end of the counter until my order came up.”
According to the office, fall waited 41 minutes at the end of the counter Tuesday night while staff at a location in suburban Maryland worked through a line of mobile orders, all of them for drinks named after it. When its order was finally called, the barista read the name on the cup as “Ottoman.” Fall did not correct her. The office said the season then attempted to drop the first leaves of the year in a parking lot in Ohio, only to find the lot already decorated with 3,400 artificial leaves, all of them flame orange and 11 of them scented, which had been installed by a shopping center in mid-August. Fall left its leaves on a bench, the office said, and is expected to try again Thursday in a part of the lot that has not yet been seasonally activated.
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the season’s complaint did not hold up.
“Fall is not a date. Fall is a flavor. And the flavor came out in August,” Brickhouse said by phone from a car wash. “Any reasonable person can see that whoever shows up with the cinnamon first is the season. It’s just common sense.”
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said that if the drink’s launch continues to move up by one day per year, as it did this year, the latte will return before the previous fall has ended in approximately 2273, at which point it will never leave and fall will be, in her words, “a seasonal limited-time offer within the drink.” Further study is needed, Teller said, and the Center has applied for funding, which it expects in time for spring, or for what will by then be called early fall.
Winter, which is due in December, released a brief statement Wednesday morning saying that it had checked, and that the peppermint drinks were already in the stockroom.