Pumpkin-spice season is Wall Street’s favorite quarter

By mid-September, the country performs its quietest costume change. Before the first leaf even hits the sidewalk, America already smells like nutmeg. Wool socks reappear — even when the thermometer disagrees. The Uggs migrate from your closet to the sidewalk. And somewhere in that choreography, a paper cup becomes a signal: Fall has been declared by corporate consensus. Boots thump, blanket scarves bloom, and the most memed consumer in the country — the Christian-Girl-Autumn archetype who talks about cinnamon foam like it’s a personality trait — returns on schedule, latte in hand. The joke is that she’s “basic.” The business case is that she’s reliable. 

Because pumpkin spice isn’t a meme anymore; it’s a calendar.

And Starbucks built the calendar. Twenty-two years after the drink went national — it was tested in about 100 stores in Vancouver and Washington in 2003, then rolled out across the U.S. in 2004 — the pumpkin-spice latte (PSL) is less a beverage than a seasonal operating system, spanning coffee chains, grocery aisles, and whole aisles of three-wick candles. When Starbucks flips the fall switch, visits rise in all 48 continental states — with measurable launch-day spikes that have now repeated with metronomic consistency.  The ritual might be ironic, but the spending is not.

The company now treats late August like a soft holiday, and the market obliges. This year’s launch on August 26 set a U.S. sales record and lifted visits across all 48 continental states, repeating last year’s surge; Utah was among the standouts at over 40% above its daily average. The pattern is so dependable that Placer.ai describes the PSL as a “reliable traffic and revenue anchor.” Competitors play the same game, but the launch-day boost at Dunkin’ or Dutch Bros. still doesn’t match the Starbucks effect. No one has turned limited-time offers into a traffic engine quite like Seattle.

Last year’s splash also quantified the scale nicely: On August 22, 2024, U.S. Starbucks locations saw about a 24% rise in visits versus the day-before-launch average; North Dakota was up 45.5% and Mississippi 4.8% — a neat reminder that the heartland leans in even as the coasts roll their eyes on social media. This year looks “nearly identical,” which is precisely the point. The ritual is the moat. Behind the foam is a tidy lesson in retail physics: predictable ritual begets predictable revenue. Analysts who live in anonymized foot-traffic dashboards have started to describe the PSL not as a drink but as a “financial instrument” — a seasonal asset that widens Starbucks’ competitive advantage precisely because it is so stubbornly repeatable.

The fandom is industrialized, too. Starbucks nurtures a year-round fall micro-culture — the private Leaf Rakers Society on Facebook (with over 40,000 members), dedicated to all things fall — and the company packages the lore in anniversary posts and press notes that read like liturgy for latte season. It’s kitsch, and it works.

The holiday Starbucks invented

Starbucks doesn’t just drop a drink; it orchestrates a season (and a quarter). Menus, merch, influencer rituals, and a captive fan base converge into a predictable early-fall traffic event that advertisers would pay to borrow and investors can practically pencil into models. The product is nostalgia. The asset is anticipation. When your customer has been trained to treat a date on the calendar like a holiday, the line between marketing and operations disappears.

There’s now a premium for feeling cozy. Each year, LendingTree scrapes prices on dozens of “pumpkin-spice vs. regular” pairs and, each year, it finds a surcharge. For 2025, the average pumpkin markup clocked in at 8.4% — higher than 2024’s 7.4% but still below the 2022 peak. It is retail’s most benign price discrimination: Charge a little more when the customer is buying a mood. The spread shows up in grocery (Target’s pumpkin trail mix versus its everyday mix), in center-store (Trader Joe’s Pumpkin O’s versus Joe’s O’s), and, yes, at the coffee counter (a pumpkin latte versus a regular latte). That’s seasonality, measured to the decimal.

Zoom out, and the category is no novelty. NielsenIQ’s count of pumpkin-flavored products crested around $800 million in the 12 months through July 2023 — a tidy floor for a market that keeps adding SKUs and retailers. The PSL may be the tentpole, but the franchise sprawls across cookies, breads, beers, yogurts, and even pet treats. When a flavor can animate a dozen aisles for twelve weeks, the margin math stops looking cute and starts looking strategic.

Home is where the cinnamon is

If the cup is the billboard, the kitchen is the conversion. Instacart’s order data shows that pumpkin-spice creamers explode in the fall — up roughly 1,459% in September to November compared with the rest of the year — a clean signal that a chunk of latte season has migrated to the home. And that means that the ritual survives the budget pivot: brew at home, upgrade the flavor, keep the cozy. In a year when households are still nursing inflation hangovers, that’s how a meme becomes a line item.

Then, there’s the other PSL: pumpkin-scented living. Candle buyers treat September like spring training and December like the Super Bowl. Bath & Body Works’ fourth quarter is the workhorse, with billions in seasonal sales riding on fragrance releases and promo tentpoles; Yankee Candle turns its own fall lineup into an annual fandom drop. Americans spent an estimated $5.8 billion on scented candles back in 2021, and the habit has only deepened with the home-centric tilt of post-pandemic life. 

The path from latte to living room is shorter than it looks.

Grocery plays along. Private labels and culty chains use pumpkin as a content strategy — a reason to visit, a reason to post, a reason to come back next week for the SKU you couldn’t find yesterday. Trader Joe’s practically re-merchandises the store around the drop, from Pumpkin Spice Liège Waffles to pumpkin brioche, a carnival of amber packaging that turns the mundane Saturday stock-up into an event. Trader Joe’s won’t tell you how those items sell. They don’t have to; the line at the checkout does.

The culture smells like fall

Part of the endurance here is that pumpkin spice has become a mood board you can buy, a way to perform seasonality in a climate and culture that often refuse to behave. August is sweltering, but your first sip of an iced pumpkin cream chai says autumn is coming anyway. The country tends to ritualize through consumption; this one is simply better branded than most. The snobs can scoff as much as they want; the army will still show up.

This year, Montclair State found that there are about 15% fewer pumpkin-spice searches in 2025 and more gripe-y posts about prices. But offline, traffic keeps showing up. It seems online fatigue is just another annual tradition now — like debating whether fall drinks showing up in August is “too early.”

There’s a tidy macro story in the pieces. A traffic spike you can pencil in each season. A consistent pricing premium that pads margins without alienating buyers. An at-home migration that preserves the ritual when wallets tighten. A fragrance boom that turns “cozy” into an affordable luxury when bigger luxuries feel out of reach. 

Add that all up, and you get a pocket-size stimulus plan — a seasonal boost for cafés, grocers, and home-fragrance chains that hits precisely when the year’s third quarter can use the help.  In a year when late-summer heat stretches into October and the news cycle refuses to cool, the market has successfully sold a version of fall that is punctual, scented, and measurable — in foot traffic spikes, in premiums, in creamer orders. 

And the “basic” backlash? At this point, it’s baked into the model. The early launch dates, the regional skew, the annual debate about whether we’ve reached peak pumpkin just yet — they’re all part of the anticipation machine that makes the product work. If anything, the data suggests stasis: 2025 looks a lot like 2024, and that sameness is the moat. 2026 will look a lot like this year — and so on and so on. Fall in America has a smell. It announces itself in paper cups and three-wick jars. It drives traffic, commands a small premium, and holds its value — year after cinnamon-scented year.