SEATTLE — Starbucks confirmed this week that its Halloween-themed Black Cat Frappuccino will return to select locations later this month, a decision that has produced the annual, entirely predictable, and entirely sincere national reaction: a great many people, on the internet and in line, are furious that it exists, and a great many other people are ordering a second one.

The drink, which is dark, sweet, and shaped roughly like a decision you will regret at 4 p.m., is not new. It has come back before. It will come back again. The cycle is as reliable as the seasons, except the seasons do not come with a plastic lid.

“I have been calling this drink a mistake for six years,” said Dana Kowalczyk, a woman in Portland who has, by her own account, ordered it six years in a row. “I will keep calling it a mistake. I will also keep drinking it. These are not contradictions. These are two true things.”

The chain has declined to say how many it will make, which the public has interpreted as a threat. Each October, a limited number of the drinks are produced, and each October, a portion of the country behaves as though the supply is being personally withheld from them by a man in a green apron.

"It tastes like a candle that went to a birthday party. I am getting one the day it comes out. I am not getting one the day it comes out because I care. I am getting it because it will be gone."

Nutritionists, when asked, noted that the drink contains enough sugar to power a small sedan, a fact that has never once stopped anyone from ordering it, in any year, in any country, for any reason.

Mayor-level concern has not been raised, but it has been considered. A high school sophomore in Columbus, reached between classes, said the Black Cat Frappuccino was “the only thing that gets me through October,” then clarified that October is, for him, “the hard one,” a statement his school counselor declined to comment on.

THE BLACK CAT FRAPPUCCINO: ODDS & OUTCOMES

  • Chance of it being good for you: Zero. This has never been the offer.
  • Chance of it selling out: High, because it is produced in the same quantities every year and the country behaves as though it is surprised every year.
  • Chance you will post about it: Higher than the chance you will finish it.
  • Chance it returns next October: Certain. The cat always comes back. The cat has nine lives and one of them is a seasonal beverage.

At press time, a Starbucks barista in Denver said she had already been asked for the drink twice, on a day it was not yet available, and had invented a version on the spot, which she described as “basically the same thing but with more confidence and less of the actual product.”