Believe It or Not, Pumpkin Spice Season Has Already Begun

Courtesy of Amazon

This is almost as bad as the department stores who choose to light up their decorative Christmas trees a full two weeks before Thanksgiving. Or those special-edition Valentine's Day candies that appear on store shelves the day after New Year's. Or the Easter egg chocolates that...well, you get the point.

The thing is, seasonally-confused marketing is nothing new. In fact, we're pretty sure it's often entirely intentional. When we hear Mariah Carey's voice as we're strolling through the aisles of our local CVS, we can't help but want to celebrate the holidays a little early.

And yet, somehow, this particular instance of way-too-early marketing feels—somehow!—more egregious than any we've witnessed before. Because it involves a seasonal trend that's inherently eye-rolling as is: pumpkin spice.

Don't get us wrong; we still love the taste of the stuff. It's just that it's managed to infiltrate so many industries—from butter to Peeps to, yes, even hair color—that we've grown a little weary of it. At the very least, we can rest easy knowing that we'll only have to deal with the onslaught of pumpkin spice lattes and pastas and beer bottles during the standard pumpkin spice season, right? September through November, and not a day earlier, with a strict cut-off of Thanksgiving Day?

...RIGHT?!

Nope. Beginning yesterday, Cost Plus World Market brought back its annual pumpkin spice coffee flavor to celebrate National Coffee Month, which arbitrarily happens to be August. The 12-ounce bags of pre-ground coffee contain "the flavors of fresh baked pumpkin pie," and they're not the only fall-centric item the brand's bringing back; the limited-edition flavor is complemented by both a Caramel Apple and a Bourbon Pecan flavor.

"It's Never Too Early For Fall Flavors," reads the beginning of the cheerful release in which all of these announcements are housed.

Okay, maybe we should have expected this since last year at about this time even Cheerios got in on the pumpkin spice action.

But with parts of the country hitting triple-digit temperatures this week, we'd have to disagree, World Market. We'd simply have to disagree.