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Starbucks Japan lucky bag showdown! We snag three fukubukuro, but are they all the same?【Pics】

Casey Baseel Jan 5, 2021
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You can always count on cool drinkware, cute plushies, and free coffee from Starbucks Japan at New Year’s.

Fukubukuro/lucky bags have been part of the New Year’s fun in Japan for a long time, but they’ve really become a hot item in the last few years. It seems like just about every retailer and restaurant chain in the country now offers some sort of fukubukuro, but none are more popular than the ones from Starbucks.

The coffeehouse’s lucky bags are so popular that you have to be picked out of a lottery system just to be able to purchase one. However, being the fukubukuro-obsessed professionals we are, no fewer than three SoraNews24 writers managed to snag a Starbukcs lucky bag this year, so let’s see what was inside the 7,500-yen (US$72) bundle.

First things first: the Starbucks fukubukuro actually comes in a box (with fukubukuro/福袋 stamped on the top). Don’t worry, though, there’s plenty of bag-y goodness once you open the flaps.

Inside the cardboard crate is a Starbucks tote bag, and it’s inside that that the various lucky bag goodies are stuffed.

▼ The tote bag itself is pretty nice too, with its roominess a plus since stores in Japan now charge for plastic shopping bags.

So what’s inside the bag inside the box? First off there’s a 250-gram (8.8-ounce) bag of Pike Place Roast ground coffee beans, since if you’re buying a Starbucks fukubukuro, it’s a pretty safe bet that you enjoy a cup of coffee now and then.

You also get a gift card exchangeable for a bag of Starbucks beans of your choice form a list of candidates, redeemable between January 4 and June 30. On the other hand, if your interest in coffee is strictly in drinking it not making, it, you’ll be happy to know you also get six Starbucks drink certificates, which can be used between January 1 and June 27.

But the real fun comes from the drinkware packed inside the fukubukuro, like this snazzy stainless steel tumbler.

So far, all the items we’ve shown were in all three of our bags, but there’s also a bit of the luck of the draw to Starbucks’ fukubukuro. While all three of our bags contained daruma wishing doll-themed mugs (daruma being an auspicious symbol strongly associated with New Year’s in Japan), two of them looked like this…

…while our third bag really leaned into the roly-poly daruma aesthetic.

Each bag also contains a second tumbler/drink bottle, and here we got three completely different designs: this Christmas bottle…

…a summery “whipped cream” tumbler…

…and this thing, which at first we thought was a baby bottle until we remembered it’s actually called the “Sunny Bottle” and is a cold drink-only container from Starbuck’s sakura cherry blossom collection from spring 2020.

Rounding off the fukubukuro haul, and getting back to items that were in all three of our bags, there’s a foldable triangle cushion, just the thing for relaxing with as you sip on one of your many, many cups of coffee that are part of the package…

…and, finally, a daruma Bearista plushie to keep you company.

▼ Well, maybe this one’s not so much keeping us company as telling us to get back to work, but it’s pretty cute all the same.

So all in all, Starbucks’ fukubukuro have enough of a shared baseline to let fans know they’re getting an attractive deal, but also just enough of a random element to give you a few fun surprises. Add in the return of some old favorites (along with the Sunny Bottle being a leftover from last spring, the daruma mugs and plushie look like they’re using use the motifs from last New Year’s drinkware collection) and a generous six months in which to use the drink certificates, and the bundle is great both for looking back on the year that just ended and ahead to good things in the months to come.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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