If you've visited a Starbucks in the past week, you'd half-expect your overpriced beverage of choice to be served to you by cuddly puppy dogs and fairies and unicorns.

At a store in Hempfield, Pennsylvania, a woman, described only as the "type of person that, when you ask her how she is ... she'll say, 'I'm dancing above marvelous,' or 'I'm flirting with fantastic,'" supposedly bought a cup of coffee for a fellow customer without being prompted to do so, starting a two-hour "cheer chain" of benevolence in which customers repeatedly picked up the tab for the car behind them in the drive-thru line. In Miami, Florida, it was reported that a Tai Chi master responded to a man yelling at him "with a bit of Zen" by purchasing his coffee for him, starting a chain that lasted all day long. A similar story, this one out of Riverdale, California, is now emblazoned on some of Starbucks' ubiquitous red holiday cups.

But is this really random kindness or the wily manipulations of the Starbucks' PR team?

These seemingly spontaneous little explosions of goodwill just happen to coincide with the re-introduction of the coffee behemoth's "Pass the Cheer" ad campaign, which debuted during last year's holiday season. As part of the campaign, customers are encouraged to adopt the Biblical mantra "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," presumably so that the Karmic high you are on after getting your Venti Eggnog Soy Latte for free will propel you to open your wallet and shell out your hard-earned cash upon return. The company has even set up an auxiliary website, itsredagain.com, where good-hearted caffeine addicts can start their own "Cheer Chains."

Cynics are already speculating that the cheery stories passing through the news cycle, if not totally fabricated, are actually the results of tips from the Starbucks PR machine. (Outlets around the country, including Good Morning America, have picked up on the Pennsylvania and Florida stories). "Does anyone think a store-level employee is going to call the media to report that some people at the drive-thru are paying for each other's drinks. AND, even if the call was made, do you think the city desk is going to jump on that story?" asks a commenter on StarbucksGossip.com.

Bridget Barker, a spokesperson for the company, denied that the chain had made up the stories or had fed them to media outlets. "Not true. These fantastic and spectacular stories just show that there is holiday cheer going around," Barker says. "We are simply encouraging folks to pass on what comes around." A representative of Weiden and Kennedy, the Portland, Oregon-based ad agency that created the campaign, also said that the firm had not been contracted to set up any "Cheer Chains" at Starbucks outlets, but that they had been giving out $5 gift cards to individuals drinking Starbucks on the street.

We'll go this far: The "cheer chains" are about as real as Hell's Kitchen chef Gordon Ramsay breaking the hell out of one of them.