The You Are Here Gold ornaments are a great design for the collectors who like mugs, but prefer a Christmas ‘feel’ to them. In 2018, Starbucks released 10 ornaments for the countries of Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. It was part of an emerging emphasis of European ornaments. In 2019 we were pleased to get even more countries; Greece, Istanbul, Italy (VERY LATE), Lebanon, Scotland, and United Arab Emirates.

Along with these new countries, we had something very odd happen. Starbucks released AGAIN Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. I say odd, because we rarely see this in done with Starbucks ornaments.

Here is where it gets even more interesting. Austria, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland were updated with a new date stamp of 2019 on the bottom to match the rest of the new ornaments. However, Belgium and Netherlands were literally the same 2018 versions just put out on the shelf again. All 10 maintained the original SKU from their 2018 versions as well.

So the question is, does one buy, by all accounts except the date on the bottom, the exact same ornament again? Do we collect by style/design, by date releases, or by SKU?

It seemed from the ornament community group posts, that SKU and style are the primary filters and that most collectors passed on the duplicates.

The other time this happened was back in 2016 with the re-release of 3 of the original 5 You Are Here ornaments. In 2013 Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle were released. In 2016 a much larger collection was released also including New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. While the ornaments were very similar (see comparison article) the SKU’s were different.

Another possible time is the Architectural Series of 2006 and 2007. Some were released in set packaging and some individually with different dates. It is not really clear what happened as collectors were not in abundance then and source info is scant.