It seems to go further. They must be intentionally adding ingredients that have a high sugar content, else they would never get to the 21g of sugar in a 21oz drink, as mentioned by the article.

This is basically standard practice worldwide for most "sugar free" products. Most common sources are dates, apple juice concentrate, honey in my experience.

Products actually using erythritol, mannitol, or xylitol instead are a rarity.

“People bought it in droves and whatever the fines, they’ll pale next to the profits” seems a legitimate enough justification? The cost of a diabetes death is only a few million dollars if they can cast enough doubt in a courtroom and a business has no capability for shame or humiliation. Starbucks the corporation has no moral or ethical duty unless one is enforced by their terms of incorporation, and one images Starbucks would rather die than see itself turned into a B-corp, so I doubt that’ll ever come to pass.

I’m confused why this type of thing is so reliably a surprise to us as a community. It’s the same ethical model that HN’s own industry operates under, so I’ve assumed we’d all be well familiar with it by now? Especially given how many of our salaries that exact same amorality has paid. I’m sure that’s exactly what’s happening at Starbucks, too: a bunch of people want to succeed and found a way to sweeten sugar free drinks with milk concentrate, which is a pretty genius move in a business context. I mean, this story could outright be an opening hook for a Better Off Ted episode for how cliché it is:

Veronica: “Ted, we need a smoothie that can be legally labeled sugar-free while tasting as sweet as tears of a crying young child after I’ve taken her ice cream and eaten it all up.”

Ted: “We can do that! Uh, was that a simile?”

Veronica: “No, it was vanilla.”

The business side of Better Off Ted was an accurate representation of the default state of a business’s ethics: Not Applicable. Fines and penalties for the rare case of being held accountable for impersonal malice towards customers are budgeted for in the same way that one budgets for bribes: have enough liquid assets to cover the immediate threats and delay any court proceedings long enough for the market to forget the risk while you reserve interest earned to pay it without disrupting operating profits. It externalizes ethical responsibilities onto the courts the same way Amazon externalizes packaging waste onto municipal waste streams worldwide, and outsourcing problems is Good Business 101.

I recognize one this probably seems morally bankrupt, but I’m not endorsing their behavior — I, a high-functioning sociopath, think that they’re a parasitic malignancy, and certainly I am well able to recognize sociopathy and amorality, given how often I see it in the mirror. Cancers such as theirs should be irradiated with changes to incorporation laws to be prosocial while their profits are permanently capped, with copyleft-style clauses to ensure that anyone who buys or operates their assets is then bound by those same requirements, They have done grievous harms to human labor and will clearly lie at the drop of a penny in their register, and should be used as a lesson to the other antisocial businesses on why they need to fake giving a shit through actions rather than just platitudes lest they be forced to wither to a husk of their former valuation while still operating technically profitably but in a way that’s utterly useless for financial engineering. But my opinion about how we ought to apply morality isn’t relevant here, helping others comprehend that we’re facing corporate sociopathy is — I’m only mentioning it to contrast the difference between “describe the sociopath” and “judge the sociopath” :)