Caribou Coffee Sleeves Telling People To 'Fight The Urge To Remain Indoors' Removed Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

Inappropriate Caribou Coffee Sleeves Removed Amid Coronavirus Pandemic Jeff Bukowski/Shutterstock
Syjil Ashraf|

What was initially meant to be a nice, motivational quote encouraging people to enjoy the outdoors has turned out to be dangerous advice and an inconvenience for Caribou Coffee employees amid the coronavirus pandemic. The phrase "Fight the urge to remain indoors" is written on countless of the chain's coffee sleeves. While this is normally find advice, it currently goes against many government and health officials' guidelines for quarantine and social distancing.

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The coffee sleeves went viral on video-sharing social media platform TikTok this week, after a Caribou Coffee employee shared the fact that he had to go through and remove each sleeve with the offending quote.

https://www.tiktok.com/@msr828/video/6827963423523966214

The employee, Michael Reinhardt, can be seen in the video wearing a proper face covering and his work apron in what appears to be the backroom of his workplace.

"So, I work in this coffee shop, right?" said Reinhardt. "And we have these sleeves for the coffee cups so you don't burn your hand, and they have cute, outdoorsy nature phrases — very on-brand for us."

Turning the camera towards a box of coffee sleeves on the floor, he added: "But I have to go in and I have to take out every fourth one because they printed them with the words 'fight the urge to remain indoors,'" holding up the sleeve in question for the viewer to see before throwing it in another box.

The sleeves had already been noticed by the Minnesota-based coffehouse chain's customers, some of whom had posted about them on Twitter.

"I think Caribou Coffee needs to update their coffee sleeves," one user tweeted on May 14. 

Another location seemed to already have noticed the problem, with one user tweeting a picture of a sleeve on April 10 that just said "Remain indoors."

"My local Caribou Coffee has been handing out cup sleeves with the top line blacked out. It normally reads "fight the urge to go," said the tweet.

A Caribou Coffee spokesperson told Buzzfeed News that it had, indeed, ordered its workers to "go through and sort out materials that were produced before the pandemic and aren't exactly on point with the heroic efforts that are being made to contain the coronavirus."

The TikTok video, which at the time of this article has more than 240,000 likes and countless shares across social media, is just one of many stories of kindness and joy that have come out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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