Moreover, prices didn’t go up nationwide, only in Starbucks stores in the Northeast and much of the Sun Belt. And as it turns out, the $2.01 price for a cup of coffee may not exist anywhere but Manhattan. Mr. Olson wouldn’t say.

Perhaps by design, the company’s regional pricing resembles a patchwork quilt. Even in the New York metro area, where the price of a tall cup of coffee rose 10 cents, the actual price in stores depends on the town or borough in which you buy your coffee. With the help of family and friends, I conducted an informal survey. In Brooklyn, the home borough of Howard Schultz, the Starbucks founder, a tall cup in Park Slope cost $1.91, with tax. In Great Neck in Nassau County and in West Nyack in Rockland County, it cost $1.79, with tax.

In other words, if you leave Manhattan, you don’t have to pay $2.01.

Still, Manhattan is the media capital of the world, and journalists tend to drink strong coffee. Even if the $2.01 price is a tempest in a teapot, the one-cent storm was sure to be noticed.

Reporters are expected to call experts for comment, so I did.

Andrew M. Barish, an equity analyst at Jefferies & Company in San Francisco, said that from the standpoint of corporate earnings, in a volatile environment for commodities like coffee and milk, a modest retail increase like this would most likely keep Starbucks right on track. Each day, the company’s stock seems to be flirting with a new high. “They’re doing a lot of things right,” he said. “Maybe not setting this price at $2.01, but a lot of things.”

DAN ARIELY, the behavioral economist at Duke University, said that “making people pay in pennies is obviously a very annoying thing,” but that people make initial purchasing decisions based on the posted price, not the price at the cash register.

“If the experience at the cash register is annoying enough, it might cause people to make a change,” he said. But that may be good for Starbucks if it induces people to buy more expensive items that haven’t risen in price, or if penny shock switches people to using credit cards. “We know that people using credit find it easier to buy more,” he said.

Furthermore, Professor Ariely said, Starbucks may want to gradually move its prices even higher, “so it may have been time for Starbucks to breach the $2 price barrier for a tall coffee and get people thinking differently.”